All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

Commerce in the morning

The Portable Son, ,

I love the feeling of commerce in the morning. Grabbing a bagel at the coffee shop, stopping off at the drive-thru bank teller, booking a car while briskly walking to an elevator in a distant city. I don’t know. It gets my small-town, merchant-blood flowing. It’s my middle-aged belief that all real business transpires before lunch.

All that’s throat clearing to say that there is a new online spot where you can buy my book, specifically my Bandcamp page. I do realize that books are not usually sold on Bandcamp, but I’ve already got the page up, and the pipes connected, and that “merch” tab was sitting there unused. This effort is partially inspired by the “you can just do things” discourse, which I’m a sucker for, and partially inspired by a couple of friends out there doing cool stuff. 

The paperback is the “limited baby blue” edition. I’ve got about 19 left.

Notes on ‘Privacy’

book reviews, ,

Privacy by Molly Young
2025

It’s a short novella-length memoir derived from the journal she kept while pregnant. Her wit sparkles throughout. It’s basically a normal pregnancy, punctuated by her particular sensibility, until the post-pregnancy hemorrhage that almost kills her, which she narrates in a surprisingly brisk and unemotional fashion. Perhaps all that’s occluded here is what’s meant by the title, which puzzled me throughout, until I finished the book and sat pondering the crumbs of my breakfast, suddenly grateful for all the mothers I knew who became mothers without dying. 

It seems difficult to write any kind of memoir, but then also to write any kind of memoir that has a lever regarding how much personal information to include. I have written before how I have come to think that personal writing, or “reality television,” for lack of a better phrase, invites judgment on behalf of the audience/reader, whereas fictionalizing somehow invites empathy. This is not my idea, and I don’t know why this seems to be the case, but it still strikes me as true. That’s to say that Young is able somehow here to disclose personal details of her pregnancy and its aftermath without it being personal, or “too personal,” or personal enough so that it transpires into the kind of “real” performance that invites audience judgment. Perhaps it has something to do with her brisk narration, her rather clear obscurities. Perhaps it’s because it’s more focused on details in the world than her own psychological theater. 

Throughout the book, Young mentions how there appear to be no works of literature that deal with pregnancy, and so this memoir stands as a small corrective. It’s not as if all the details are groundbreaking. There is the routine transformation of the mother’s body from an autonomous being into an animal that exists to provide sustenance to another animal — the rude assertion of nature that occurs while everyone is still living in a semblance of civilization. Routine stuff, but still, it’s made interesting and new by Young’s voice, the details she notices. She collects obscure pregnancy pamphlets and peppers the text with historical flotsam related to her progress. It’s the most normal story of all, until it’s not. 

In the final pages of the book, when the hemorrhage takes place, pregnancy turns into trauma, or rather giving birth is the trauma. While there may not be many books where pregnancy is the underlying narrative, I do think there are books where giving birth is depicted as a traumatic event. Two recent novels spring to mind: Miranda July’s All Fours and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble. In both novels, the mother characters undergo terrible births, and they are (understandably) haunted by this experience throughout the book. It functions as a gigantic, characterological explanatory event, like a personal Nagasaki. 

This isn’t bad per se. I think that both mother characters in these two novels would be more interesting without the trauma-birth story, but that being said, the traumatic birth story does serve as a reminder, that amidst the comedy of pregnancy and child-rearing, or the accidental drudgery of marriage, all of this entertainment floats by on a river of blood, potentially. 

At least that’s how it feels in Young’s zine. That’s how she refers to it. The short book is self-published, and brings to three the number of novella-length nonfictional zines she’s published. It’s a sharply designed, all black, perfect-bound paperback that’s not quite thick enough to weather the kind of aggressively splayed bookreading I prefer, but otherwise it’s a nice object. Young is a successful journalist and book reviewer, having written for the New York Times Magazine for years, and also having done stints at New York magazine and the New York Times Book Review. I think I’ve got all those credentials right. What’s interesting is how despite her consistent success in established legacy media publications, she has continued to publish her own stuff as well. That is, it’s interesting to me, a total nobody. She refers to a meeting with an agent at one point, who throws out wild ideas she could pursue. It’s played for comedy in the book, but it makes one wonder. Did this small book ever get pitched? Why did Young choose to publish it this way? Aside from being glad that it exists, qua book, it’s neat that it exists in this particular way, so tightly envisioned and executed. It’s as if Geoff Dyer and Maggie Nelson had a little sister who knew her way around InDesign. 

The book is available here.

Against coherence, part II

Uncategorized, ,

Once again I am deeply disappointed in my home printer.

Everyone talking directly to a camera, holding a gimmicky, small microphone, explainitorializing. 

My review of all modern tacos: entirely too much crema.

All software is too slow. 

When people show me their AI creations, I feel embarrassed for them.

New York Review of Gift Guides

All literary criticism is just an excuse for making lists.

You’ll be more interesting without optimizing.

Look, you can either do your life’s work, or you can look up stuff on Wikipedia, but you can’t do both.

Modern life contains entirely too much beeping.

Gulf of Amnesia

You’re not “obsessed” with that object — backpack, lemon-peeler, whatever. You just like it. Just say that.

The United States of Lines

The only people who care about audio fidelity are dorks. Dorks are important, but they are necessarily a subset.

Home design shows: problematic.

Something powerful about making a soup.

I always forget how many people dig on the Pope.

Indifference to royal family as principle of adulthood.

Every interaction now triggers a survey. “How did I do?” shrieks the mailbox, the fire hydrant, the paper towel dispenser.

Jazz lives (at the airport).

The people who travel with their pets are different.

Dancing, as a part of live musical performance: almost always overrated.

AI iconography reminds me grimly of glitter.

To go on sabbatical from being one’s self.

If it doesn’t work all of the time, it doesn’t actually work.

This is a test of the mundane broadcast system.

I am anti-Holidays, but the innovations in seasonal inflatable decoration are undeniable.

Is it possible to dislike a golden retriever?

The internet sped up the lifecycle of cliches. It’s a superspreader of conventions.

I rather fancy the Midwest.

Overall I applaud the proliferation of Substack newsletters and related examples of writers banging their own drum, but I encourage better proofreading.

I don’t understand how pop-ups on web pages are still a thing.

Camping: I don’t see the appeal.

Primal disgust: wet cat food.

Thinking of taking my mimetic desire out for a run on my hedonic treadmill.

At some point we all became diatribalists.

Country dogs hit different.

I dislike sequels.

There are people of the Word, people of the Excel, and people of the Confusing Color Charts.

Small dogs hit different. 

Going through life on the lookout for that Danver’s ice.

Airports should be silent

plague journal, ,

Can you hear it? It’s the silent airport, the text-only airport, the airport of the future, the airport of your dreams. This is the progress of civilization. Airports shouldn’t be library quiet. They should be completely silent. Abandoned-church-in-the-middle-of-the-night quiet. Welcome.

There are lots of indignities in the modern American airport. The food, both on the ground and in the air, is somehow both overdetermined and bland. TSA is our contemporary theater of the absurd. The process of herding on and off the planes with all our nicely designed luggage puts the idea of human intelligence into question. The overwhelming presence of coordinated sweatsuit sets does not help matters. All of it makes me feel crazy. And yet, I’ll take it everyday. What I want to change is simply the noise in the modern airport.

Here in wonderful 2026, there is no need to have anything but text-based communication in the airport. No public announcements. No announcements from the gate. No more innocuous “welcome to our city” messages by whomever the mayor of Atlanta currently is. (I always seem to hear this while I’m urinating.) No more well-intentioned announcements about child trafficking. There should be signs saying what’s arriving, what’s departing. There should be signs outside the gates showing the same. There should be text messages delivered silently to your phone updating you on the whereabouts of your flight. If you come into the airport, you automatically consent, along with the TSA body search, to receiving silent text messages from the airport. Like with firearms, all audible alerts should be removed once you enter the premises. If we can make AI happen, then we can make this happen. No phone calls. If you need to talk on the phone, there should be private booths where you can conduct your shameful business. (I feel like this used to be a thing historically.) If people can hear you converse from your booth, then they should stare at you and you should feel shame. If you have a problem with your flight that cannot be resolved via text, there should be slightly larger booths where you and an airline official can discuss the matter, far, far away from everyone else.

Part of my beef is that it there are too many sounds. To begin, there is the modern American compulsion to blast pop music from every restaurant, bar, and kiosk, as if we were all trapped in an endless music video directed by Satan. (His theme song is “Mambo No. 5.”) Second, the public announcements don’t work. They’re too difficult to hear and they don’t inform. Airport terminals are too close together for any of the individual terminal announcement systems not to get hopelessly muddled. And then these announcements get preempted by the larger terminal-wide announcements. I’m always trying to parse the noise, trying to figure out what is relevant information. It’s like trying to unweave a rug with my teeth. They should instead install those digital highway signs, those boondoggles that purportedly announce upcoming traffic accidents and road closures but which in the Land of Progress mostly sport bad puns related to safe driving. It’s like a modern WPA program for poets. There are worse uses of federal funds, but still.

The announcements that are given at the gate and then on the airplane itself are so rote that many airlines or flight attendants use the occasion to work on their stand-up material. We’ve all witnessed the “humorous flight safety video.” We’ve all been accosted by the flight-attendant doing a bit. It feels like being trapped with an overly enthusiastic football mascot with slightly less fur. I like it when people are funny. I am not a monster. But this is not funny. It’s annoying and desperate. I know the lawyers require the pinned-back-eyelids transmission of the safety video though it seems like this sphere is ripe for innovation. Perhaps take a clue from the endless, unreadable and unread Terms of Service agreements. Let’s get Apple to work on those flight videos. Perhaps travelers can agree to the terms at the same time they agree not to make a peep as soon as they enter the jetbridge, or whatever we’re calling the entrance to the airport now.

While I’m being picky, the planes themselves should be quieter. These machines are too loud inside. All that groaning and gear-shifting. I shouldn’t have to wear my cubicle-grade headphones to shield myself from the Lynchian industrial keening. Perhaps Delta could explore some better insulation technologies or phase cancellation possibilities. Perhaps a collaboration with some outfit like Yeti coolers. I realize that’s a different technology entirely, but man, those coolers really do work. I feel like this could be a mutually beneficial synergistic collab.

And then finally there is my fellow American traveler, equipped now for 18 years at least with a smart phone and yet none the wiser about using it, or at least none the more subtle. The prevalence of taking phone calls on speaker in public shocks me, as if I’m some spinster witnessing white pants after Labor Day. I am not a monster. But honestly, take that call somewhere else and in a way where no one else can hear it, where no one else is subjected to it. It’s a kind of aggressive rudeness, forcing a private conversation into the public sphere. Of course I have heard middle-aged professionals instigate calls while urinating in the public restroom in my office building, so there are really no limits to a lack of decorum. (Perhaps they are calling the mayor of Atlanta.) Video calls on speaker are just a declension of the same psychosis. I admit to not understanding the appeal of video calls in general, much less while I’m walking between terminals. (I’m pretty sure Short Form Video is one of the Seven Seals, but I’ll save that rant for another day.)

Instead, hear it with me. See it. Feel it. Completely quiet. Just the sound of people walking. I don’t want to put anyone in jail or anything. I just think some strategic social shaming is in order. I don’t think people should be cancelled or whatever we’re calling it now. But I do think that the people who take video calls on speaker should be politely led off the premises and banned for six months. I’m not a monster. It’s just that silence is golden. Or if not golden, then a pleasant ocher. And something we should strive to paint together. No one likes travelling. I mean, maybe the super rich do. But I’m talking about actual human beings here.

I’m of course writing this from an airport. I’ve got my ear plugs in but I can still hear the kids shrieking from one direction and the vacuuming from another. I can’t hear the announcements, but I can hear that emergency door alarm, the kind that goes off intermittently and seems engineered to loosen bowels and yet which effectuates no change in behavior from anyone. The door just makes that sound every now and then like some dispeptic animal. I don’t think my prohibition should apply to small children. I’m not a monster. Toddlers are going to be toddlers. But as the kids get older we should teach them that the proper approach to air travel is a funereal respect. A holy silence so that can people can watch their ipad movies in peace. Air travel is an absurd privilege, one we should accept while minimizing human suffering.

Also, grownups: no traveling with a blanket. Have some self-respect.

The clone wars come home

literary lint, plague journal, Publicity, ,

A couple of weeks ago I received a friendly email from a fellow who lavished me with praise for my one published book, a collection of stories called The Portable Son, published by a small press many moons ago. He wanted to present the book to his book club. 

I of course was thrilled to receive any positive commentary from a reader. That’s all I really ever want: unending praise from total strangers. This alone will finally make me feel whole. So I wrote him back and said thank you, but that I was a little confused as to what he needed me to do to effectuate him sharing the book with his book group. It was indeed published moons ago, but it is still purchasable, in handy paperback or ebook form, and if you have trouble with that, you can always email me and I will sell you a copy the old-fashioned way. (That is, PayPal.) He said that he needed my permission and a digital copy of the book, and if that went well, we could discuss further procedures.

And here is where my ears went to a point. I am ripe for random praise from strangers but I am also wary of scams. And I’ve reached the point in my life and in my experience with the internet where I think everything is a scam. The internet itself: one giant, networked scam. I two-factor authenticate my kids when they call, just to be sure they’re who they say they are, the little rascals. And so despite the enormous sinkhole of my own ego, this little email exchange seemed too good to be true. 

I’ll send it to my good friend Jim, I thought. He’s good at sniffing out scam behavior. But before I could forward the correspondence onto Jim, I received another email, from another extremely friendly stranger, extolling the virtues of my lonely little short story collection, and wondering if we could collaborate on further promotional ventures and sharing it with his group of readers. So this must be the new scam, I thought. 

Then a few days later I received another email from another would-be enthusiast. And this morning I received another. Is this what being famous feels like? Being approached by overly friendly scammers, or what’s more likely, scam robots? The prose in these emails seems real; it has the Sabrina Carpenter effect: it’s almost convincingly lifelike. Is my ego being exploited by artificial intelligence? Well, sure, but see above re: the internet. Isn’t that essentially what has always been happening since I logged on sometime in the late 90s? 

I would quote from the emails, but I feel queasy quoting from private correspondence without permission, even correspondence with robots. Yes, I am that old-fashioned. By this point in revising this post, I’ve received nearly ten solicitations from the bots. They’re all remarkably lifelike. They are all just this side of scammy. After the first I have refrained from responding. Apparently I’m on some list, the sucker list. 

I am old enough and cynical enough to be unimpressed by artificial intelligence talk. Remember when virtual reality was going to change the world? All world-ending or world-revolutionizing talk seems to spring from some existential insecurity, a longing for the apocalypse. The internet rewards exaggeration. What’s more, I’m embarrassed by my peers who use it for little tasks. I’m not against using technology to save time and effort. I am after all typing this on a laptop. I revere Excel. But asking ChatGPT therapy-adjacent questions feels embarrassing. Using AI to remix old songs for you with new, robot-played instruments is a waste of computing power and your one theoretically precious life. It’s playing in the funhouse mirror. Look how weird my face gets, etc. We must move past the mirror, move through the mirror. Tools must become mundane to become useful.

The internet is a factory of cliches. What are memes but the congealing of a culture’s sensibility. Turns of phrase quickly become commodified. It’s difficult to be online and think for oneself, articulate for oneself. Let’s briefly table whether or not this is ever possible. Being too online makes it well-nigh impossible. What are you asking ChatGPT when you ask it a question? “Give me the average response for everything.” Not the best of what has been thought and said but the normal distribution of what has been thought and said. We came for Orson Welles, and we went home with Mr. Beast. 

Anyway, I’ve just decided to let the robot spam sales pitches wash over me. If you are a real live breathing person and want to read my book, you can find it here. Or you can email me and I will sell it to you the old-fashioned way (PayPal). Or even if you are a non-human who wants to read my book. I am capitalist enough to not be completely prejudiced against the robots. But I’m not comping them a copy either. And I’m not going to send $89.99 to some robot to theoretically persuade some invisible robot readership out there to read my delicate little story collection. There’s something that only AI could invent, an audience for my short stories. 

I may be desperate for attention, but I’m still redneck enough to fundamentally distrust too much loose praise. 

Writing is a form of thinking

literary lint,

No, I don’t want help writing that email.

An artificial intelligence bot has come alive within my Gmail, and I am not inclined to use it. I might be inclined to use the summary function if it’s an email I don’t want to read, that is a text created by an institution rather than a friend. But then, if it’s not an email I want to read, then I just don’t read it. For example, did you know that you don’t have to read all the emails that your child’s school sends you? I learned this just last year when my forever partner told me. (“Duh.”) And while I still feel the slight effervescent breeze of guilt, instant deletion feels even better.

But to actually get help with writing the emails? But I actually like writing — even the tedious stuff. I enjoy writing sentences, and then fitting them together. Even if the revision turns into a kind of endless mental Tetris, and even if the end result has all the charm of re-translated stereo instructions, it’s still me in there, thinking.

And really that’s my main beef, and my main belief: writing is a form of thinking. Are there other forms? Sure. But writing is one of them. What I mean is that when I write, I don’t simply get my thoughts down as a transference mechanism. There is some of that, sure. But what’s more is that in the process of transferring those already thought-through thoughts, I discover more thoughts, or figure out what I really think through the actual process of finding the words and the order they should go in. It’s weird, alchemical, seems tautological, or slightly voodoo-y. By writing down what I think, I actually discover what I think. And then when the act is accomplished, I can go back later and re(a)discover what I thought at that moment.* Have I changed my mind since then? Most likely. But there, however impermanently, is a little word sculpture of my thought process for that day on that subject.

But then also there are the unseen thoughts, the unknown unknowns that one discovers when reading, where you find meaning perhaps where the author didn’t intend. Or you see their gaps, their mistakes, their blind spots, their noise within their signal. This too is part of writing and is part of your own writing. No one writes absolutely cleanly with no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation, except for maybe lawyers, but even lawyers make mistakes, which is why we have so many of them. Lawyering is a type of weaponized literary criticism. They are busily arguing over the latent ambiguities that their colleagues have created, recently or historically. It’s a great racket.

What happens when you reread yourself is that you see what you thought back then but also what you were wrong about. You’re able, however slightly, to see yourself as a stranger might, to see your own bald spot, your own exhausted presumptions, and that too is a kind of thought, thought’s echo, thought’s reverb, a reconsideration, perhaps even a regret. So writing becomes thought in stereo, moving through time, a moment generated into being that can be reviewed skeptically for as long as the page lasts or the wifi stays strong.

Why would I want to give that up? Sure, I need help with my spelling and my typing, which seems only to get worse. But the little corrective squiggles is one layer of robot intrusion. When you let the robot take over the structure of the syntax, then you have forfeited the chance to figure out what you really thought about something, and to be reminded of it later. You’ve robbed yourself of the pleasure of thinking for yourself.

*Sorry! Grad school trick.

How to rehearse

View from the Bandstand, ,

Rehearsals should have a goal, an agenda, a rationale, a structure, a limit, a path, a focus, a boss, a point. What’s the point of this rehearsal? is always a pertinent question, if slightly rude.

Perhaps everyone already knows this, but my experience points otherwise.

Is it a rehearsal or is it a hang? A hang is a perfectly good thing, but one should be clear about the goal. If it’s a rehearsal, what is it for? What are you rehearsing? Are you trying to get ready for a specific gig? Are you trying to work out the arrangements of new material, who plays the head, how the groove is going to lay, what happens with the bridge? Are you rehearsing as a proof-of-concept? For instance, a new group of people meeting and running through some stuff to see if it gels, if it’s feasible — if it sounds terrible and everyone wants to punch themselves after an hour. These are all valid reasons for a rehearsal, goals for a rehearsal, but my point is that the goals should be stated and held to. The goals should be explicit. Everyone should show up knowing the stakes.

What a rehearsal is not for is for everyone to practice their soloing. There is no greater corrosion of the spirit than playing a song under the auspices of preparing for a performance while everyone goes through the full Skynyrd. This is an indulgence and a waste of everyone’s time. Solos should be practiced alone at home in the dark. That’s your personal woodshedding time. Like a magic trick, its recipe should never be revealed. I suppose the theater kid analogy would be: learn your lines at home.

A couple of years back there was that Peter Jackson multi-hour documentary of the Beatles, showing them working on Let it Be. I’ve only seen a few clips. (I adore the Beatles, but who has that kind of free time?) Even in those fleeting reels I would notice Ringo sitting behind the kit, arms folded, waiting for his bandmates to get their shit together. It’s the curse of drummers everywhere, sitting quietly while the other band members teach each other the song, or write the song, or simply do work that should have been done beforehand. That’s why Ringo is a great drummer, because he sits there patiently and doesn’t go after Paul and John with a machete. Learn the songs before you get to rehearsal. I am trying not to yell. It’s like a potluck. Don’t show up unless you have a dish ready. Rehearsal is the time for getting individual components together for a performance.

How do you get it together? You practice the intros, the outros, and the head, and you note any special arrangement details. You don’t even need to play the whole song. A song by definition has sections that repeat. You don’t need to play all the verses in rehearsal. If you need practice singing all those verses, do that at home with your soloing practice. You certainly don’t need to let every horn player scrimmage over that spot where the half-diminished chord jumps out of the bushes.

And not to sound all corporate on you, but people shouldn’t cross the threshold without a clear agenda. In this rehearsal we are going to run through the intros and heads to ten songs we need to play tomorrow night. In this rehearsal we are going to work up the arrangements for four new tunes. “Work up” and “run through” are different concepts, demand different metabolisms. Working up a tune is like barn raising: in the morning there was no song, but at the end of the day, there it stood. Run through means the arrangement already exists but the band is going to confirm the details: the tempo, the groove, the key, the order of events.

But sometimes you do want to solo. You want everyone to solo in the seclusion of a non-performance safe space. You want to vibe. But that is not a rehearsal. That is a jam. Another perfectly viable form of musical collaboration, though to be sure one that’s ripe for abuse. I’ve lost count of the number of bands I’ve been in that could jam the afternoon away but could not effectuate a performance. Jamming has no parameters placed upon it, except perhaps the limits of the band members’ bladders or their girlfriends’ patience.

Most important, a rehearsal is not a performance. It’s the preparation for a performance. It’s not even a scrimmage. I knew a singer who would blow out her voice in rehearsal the day before a gig. This defeats the purpose.

Rule of thumb: if there is beer, it’s most likely a hang. Which is fine. I like hanging out with friends. I do have friends! I am trying not to yell. But the point is you should have clear expectations.

Also, as a rule, rehearsals should not last longer than two hours. Really, I think 90 minutes should be the max. It’s hard to stay focused for that long, and people are busy. Plus the restricted time window cuts down on the mayonnaise effect, asking about how everyone’s holiday went, what their kids got, all that. That’s hang talk. You want to visit, then swap spit in the parking lot afterward. Right now, we’re running through the song list. Everything in life could be shorter: movies, meetings, rehearsals, concerts, podcasts, even blog posts.

Another rule of thumb, there should be a boss, whether elected or not. Perhaps it’s just the pushiest person in the room. The bitchy wheel gets the grease, etc. But left without a leader, collective indecision will mutate the rehearsal into a hang. Whoever establishes the agenda is the de facto boss. Embrace being the boss. Tell people what to do. Like dogs, they will be silently grateful. They will thank you with their eyes.

Sometimes you don’t get the gig

View from the Bandstand, ,

Even though you know the material. Even though you know the other players. Even though you have played the same material with the same players successfully before. Even though you have no conflicts on your calendar. Even though you’ve been listening to the material for years, thinking about it, yakking about it, mooning over it. Even though you’ve had actual literal dreams in your sleep about performing on just such a gig playing just such material with players that are these exact players. Even though you are friends with everyone in the band. Even though you’ve done every reasonable non-creepy triangulation one can do to position yourself for the call when the time for the call comes. Sometimes you simply don’t get picked. And it feels terrible. I suppose if you were moving through life with supreme unending confidence and belief in one’s own powers of transformation it wouldn’t feel terrible, but I am not that person, and probably neither are you, and so when you realize that you didn’t get picked, despite all of the above, you feel terrible. You feel rejected. You feel unchosen. You feel bereft. You feel like a loser because in this gig-filling instance where there are only so many spots for musicians and just one specific gig date in question, you are in fact a loser. The loser. I’m not going to lie to you. Sometimes the ego takes a slap.  

So what do you do in such a situation? Well, you can spend an adequate amount of time feeling sorry for yourself, the problem here being how to gauge “adequate.” I’m not going to tell you to avoid all self-pity. I am not some manosphere influencer robot person. Self pity — it happens. And on these occasions I wish I could still recommend that people smoke cigarettes. I don’t recommend that. Cigarettes are bad for you; news at 11. However, one does wish one could smoke a single solitary Camel Light out on the back porch while feeling grindingly and wholly covered in shame scabs. That’s about the proper amount of self-pity. One cigarette’s worth. After that you’re just wallowing. 

Second, it’s important to keep it to yourself. I am not suggesting that you hop on all of your emotions like Yosemite Sam and never express your feelings. (Y. Sam was actually quite good at expressing his feelings.) But I am saying that self pity, expressed outside the audience of your single solitary Camel Light, is only a feedback squeal of despair. No one cares. No one understands. You’re just making noise. And it just makes you sound whiny. Because that’s how self-pity translates into the world. It wells up inside your brain as poetic, justified self pity, but the tongue can’t translate it without turning it into whining. I’m sorry. I wish this weren’t the case. So keep it to yourself and your cigarette. 

p.s. Smoking is bad. 

Don’t go complaining to the band leader, or your friends in the band, or your other friends outside the band, or your spouse. For godsakes don’t send passive aggressive texts about it. (“Really interesting lineup y’all ended up with for that bar mitzvah gig, chief.”) Don’t take it to social media and be weird. You probably shouldn’t even write highly sublimated blog posts about it. Feel sorry for yourself. Smoke your one solitary, metaphorical cigarette. And move on. 

Productive next steps that don’t include whining: there’s only one: keep practicing. Keep listening. Keep going to gigs. Keep booking other gigs. Life is not fair, and besides you are a poor judge of fairness anyhow. The only thing to do is to be like a shark and keep swimming. There’s still something you don’t know how to play. I can guarantee it. And the world is filled with players who stunted out — at 17, 27, 37, whatever. They got to their point of comfort and all progress ceased. They didn’t learn any new material. They didn’t learn how to solo over changes. They didn’t figure out how to sing harmony. Their record collection never got past 2004. They never wrote any tunes. Don’t be one of those people. Pick some underexplored skill/nook and get after it. That’s the only way to dodge the ineluctable inequities that life throws in your face, those water balloons we are all heir to. Keep moving. Only the dead stay still. 

Slang for my father

Music, ,

Now here comes the latest song from my band The Metrocenter. We recorded this as part of the MWB Semi-Live series at their studio in downtown Jackson — Sergio Fernandez’s old studio for the true JXN heads out there. This was nostalgically gratifying for me because the last time I’d been in that space working on music was with Sergio when I was recording a demo of my sensitive little college sophomore tunes. Think Ben Folds without the anger or the piano. Those scratch takes live somewhere on a cassette. But now I’ve come back, armed with equipment and friends, and have done this. 

Here’s the tune on Spotify and Bandcamp.

I wrote the tune, which turned out to be a kind of homage or sequel to (or desperate imitation of) the Horace Silver classic “Song for My Father,” which I played a kajillion times with my own father and Scott Turner. For you Steely Dan Quiz Bowl geeks, you will also recognize the Silver original as the prompt for the bass riff in the Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number.” 

Liner notes: 
Denny Burkes: drums
Jakob Clark: bass and vocals
Drew McKercher: guitar and trombone
Barrett Hathcock: Rhodes and composition
Tyler Kemp: engineering and trumpet

Thanks to TK for engineering. Thanks to John Scanlon for letting me borrow his Fender Twin at a moment’s notice. Thanks to Marc Leffler for having us in his studio. And thanks to Horace Silver. 

Sometimes I try to think through what I’m doing in this group, what I’m trying to do writing these tunes, what I’m shooting for. When we put out our first single, I joked that it was like jazz, except without the annoying parts. I still think that’s true basically, and I actually like jazz. I mean, it’s complicated. Jazz is gigantic as a category and historically fraught as a term and also implies a certain approach to the music. Mostly what it means is a commitment to improvisation over a form, if there is a form, variation upon a theme, with the proportion heavily weighted toward variation. What this song doesn’t have, both general for The Metrocenter tunes but also other instrumental tunes I tend to write, is that they don’t have the variation. They don’t have any solos over the form. They’re almost completely theme. Yes, there is some variation, but it’s not the current standard practice of jazz improvisation, which is: some kind of intro, head of the tune, everyone solos over the form, head out. When I see a big jazz band with lots of horns or other instrumentation, it’s exciting, but I also realize: everyone of these fellas is going to take a solo. We’re gonna be here for 15 minutes. It gets boring. I tend to like the heads better than the solos. Are there transcendent solos? Sure. All of these generalizations are wafer thin. I write as if I have any idea what I am doing regarding writing a tune, as if it’s deliberate practice, when in fact I’m driving backwards in the dark, with no cameras, in the fog, hoping I don’t hit anything too substantial. 

(Other details I dislike about modern jazz in particular since I’m being honest: Often I can’t tell what the theme even is. The drummer is messing with the time, fracturing it, problematizing the grid, and I can’t tap my foot. The horn players, having explored all available notes in their long solos, resort to exploring the uppermost register of their instrument, also known as kicking the cat. Bands recording yet another version of a jazz standard that’s been done unto death — music for zombies. And finally, the music often feels annoying on purpose.)

Also, part of the reason there aren’t any solos is because I can’t solo on piano. It’s the old aesthetic-choice-by-way-of-personal-limitation path. 

Perhaps this is not jazz at all, not as we’ve come to understand it. In a long profile of Khruangbin in the New York Times Magazine last year, David Byrne was quoted describing the band as “instrumental pop,” a long tradition, though now somewhat obscured. I found that phrase clarifyingly unpretentious. I suppose pop music simply means music that’s meant to be enjoyed by people, or the people, music not meant for religious procedures, or as background to some other activity such as a movie or a TikTok, though of course we know that music, once recorded, gets repurposed for all manner of distraction; nor is it music that’s intentionally fenced off via genre, like death metal or bluegrass, speaking primarily to the requirements of its selected category rather than the uninitiated strangers who might encounter it. One of the problems I have with contemporary jazz is that it feels like walking into a higher level math class, both in terms of composition and presentation, a private language clothed in the haughtiness of art. Whereas I suppose pop music is just music to listen to, to enjoy. Music that wants to be liked, perhaps too desperately. That enjoyment is primary over representing the artistic bonafides of the musicians. The late Steve Albini, when asked his opinion of jazz, said he didn’t like it because he found it to be “vain music.” I do like jazz, but I think that’s a challenging adjective. He’s not wrong. 

Perhaps the reason I even think of the term jazz when writing these short instrumental tunes is that jazz is synonymous with short form instrumental tunes and also it’s considered artistically superior. I just want to be taken seriously! And also liked! I am fun at parties.

The question then becomes if you’re not going to have solos, if you’re not going to introduce variation that way, then how are you going to keep the songs from being boring. If you’re writing a tune with vocals, then you have different verses. The words, the whole linguistic channel of information, changes the meaning of the song, an arc over time. But if it’s just the sound, then what changes? Do you just repeat yourself forever? You could change the sound, either through texture or through new instrumentation, but I find this dissatisfying. There’s too much emphasis on texture in pop music. Between the synths and the guitar pedals, which really are the same thing, there’s too much sound, and not enough emphasis on changing the rhythm or the harmony. I am mostly against distortion as a goal, which becomes a kind of aural filler. The Yiddish word for the stuffing they put inside coats is schlock.

So far then it seems that the solution is to keep things brief and introduce more themes, more melody. Most jazz standards are AABA form. I find myself searching for C and D and maybe even E sections to keep things interesting. But then again, all of this implies I am in some mode of control. Like I said above, I have no idea what I am actually doing. I did not go to music school. I did not study composition. I am mostly trying to relieve boredom, and whatever else lives deep down below boredom.

Maybe I just want to give up

Poem

Maybe I just want to give up and be a poet, 
lose the ambition, the thirst for plot, the rebar of meaning, 
a conspiracy theory located somewhere under my feet.
Maybe I just have these thoughts, these feelings, intrusive, 
half-ripe, with nowhere to put them, an open parentheses, 
incomplete embrace, Tupperware without their tops.
Maybe I should regress to singing in the car, Tommy. Can you hear me? 
Maybe I want to pack a lunch, place it on this shelf 
on the internet, sustenance for tourists 
browsing the pantry for something palatable and uninteractive. 
Maybe I want to stop making sense, 
resolve only to make sentences, little shovels 
for digging up whatever substance sleeps underground. 
All I ever wanted was to be useful.