collections: a seasonal reset

It appears that a weekly newsletter has now turned seasonal. An unfortunate, but not irreversible problem. Every so often, I’ll have a stray, aberrant thought that I’ll jot into my drafts and never release into the world. At some point, it may be useful to stop thinking about those as aberrations and give them the space to exist as fully-formed ideas. As they say, publishing something is better than nothing; no use in waiting for me to publish the next one.

  • i’ll write you a postcard, send you the news: august slipped away into a moment in time
  • the forgotten half of the holland tunnel: jack antonoff & co makes music for pop princesses and the underdogs of the jersey suburbs
  • your emotional baggage can be picked up at the next carousel: emotional baggage, flight risk, and other air travel metaphors for thought


💌


i’ll write you a postcard, send you the news

august slipped away into a moment in time

The curse continues. You should have seen it coming. You really should’ve known.

This year is when optimism goes to die; this year is when you finally let yourself want for something again and the desire gets squeezed out of you; this year is when hope became that dangerous thing because you found yourself dangling on the precipice of complacency.

Sometimes you don’t know any better, because the times give you the sign that things will get better. I’d look you in the eye and tell you how much I believed in you. And if coping mechanisms picked favorites, sublimation would be the golden child. Thermodynamics may have opinions about how the world works, but the second rule asserts entropy must increase—and we are most certainly in a closed system. When you let yourself feel it, you sublimate.

I can tell you what the front of the postcard would have looked like. Signed from another state, sealed with sun-stuck fingers. I can tell you what all of these postcards would have looked like: snapshots of a memory I never had and places I had never been. I can describe them in the same vivid, pedantic detail you would recite if you were studying for an art history lesson and reimaging someone else’s vision in your mind’s eye. This was the real thing, they say, and you nod along as if it made all the sense in the world. As if you had been there too.

On the back of the postcard, I would have written it down. Everything we saw, the way I felt; and maybe, just maybe, I’d have something to remember it by. False memories are the sublimated experiences of a life unlived. The thing is, they give you a receipt when you cancel too. They don’t let you forget that either. Here is the souvenir; goodbye and goodnight. Come again next year.

The very, very last thing I want you to know is: I’ll probably do it all again.

the forgotten half of the holland tunnel

jack antonoff & co makes music for pop princesses and the underdogs of the jersey suburbs

Disclaimer, I’ve been to Jersey maybe twice voluntarily.

With the release of Lorde’s new album, Solar Power, there’s a strange media phenomenon where her success and musicality is centered on the producer: on Jack Antonoff, the venerated pop producer that has made music with some of the biggest stars in the industry over the past few years. Gone are the days of Jack playing second fiddle to the lead of fun. (long live the fleeting, bright star that was the breakdout indie darling of a decade past), and also the days where he was inextricably coupled with Lena Dunham (a whirlwind romance forever preserved in the liner notes of Taylor’s “You are in Love”). He is a producer with a reputation and multiple Grammys that precede him; he is the first call for so many of the pop powerhouses by the name of Taylor, Lorde, Lana, and so many more.

I’m not here to talk about Jack’s collaborations and his role as a producer. I’m here to talk about him as an artist as the frontman of Bleachers. I’m here to talk about how I fell deep in the rabbithole of his sonic universe because his music was texturally recreating these feelings of youth and yearning that feel all too familiar in an internal world. And actually, I’m here to talk about this singular musical performance of Jack Antonoff with his acoustic guitar, perched atop a wooden stool, and straddling the green line of the tunnel that separates the York from Jersey.

Take the sadness out of Saturday night, Jack sings, his body positioned more in the half that is New Jersey than it is New York. Without exhaustively recapitulating the Bleachers discography, it sounds like this: it sounds like sadly having the time of your life; wondering what happened at the party you were never invited to; nodding when someone asks why you’re crying and you insist you’re the happiest you’ve ever been; walking by the empty swings of a park you’ve been to since a child yet feeling overgrown.

It’s the soundtrack of that undescribable—you are the main character of your life—feeling buried beneath snare drums and synthesizer.

His music gets that feeling. He gets that sense of being young and wanting everything, but having nothing: the blind cavernous, courage of desire matched with the disappointing grace of mundanity. The DNA of it feels inherently Jersian: an inferiority complex built on the outskirts of the big, glamourous New York City. The sort of fully-realized person you always imagined yourself to be, yet always coming up short. There is this immense sadness to being on the outside looking at the shiny and big apple of a city just one underground car ride over. Knowing you could be bold and great too (that the capacity has always been there; and the green line is arbitration), but you humble yourself and exclaim reminders that you love where you came from: a guitar and wooden stool, tunnel and traffic be damned.

emotional baggage, flight risk, and other air travel metaphors for thought

Eventually, I’ll write something real about this song.

It’s a sonic memory embedded in this web of me trying to parse how my girlhood processed into teenagehood and then phased into the young womanhood that faces me today, the sum of all these years intertwined and collapsed. My own existential vertigo.

these past months

  • watched: gossip girl (hbo max)
  • read: bobos in ikea
    • “what powers such a novel is interior weather. pith. wry observation. an accurate recreation of psychological effects under the duress capital.”
  • listened: solar power by lorde