Sad to learn that British producer William Orbit just died at 69.
While he was known for his work with stars like Madonna, U2, and Blur, I was mainly fond of his more personal ambient electronica.
Eric Hilton introduced me to the 2006 album Hello Waveforms, the tracks Sea Green and Fragmosia were in heavy rotation on the bedtime playlist when my daughter was very young.
In a way, it was among the last music that to me felt like the Beautiful Future.
We did it! Here’s a little selection of shots (by the talented Nyle Leddy) of our ‘Sanctuary’ arts event Friday night in Takoma Park.
Sanctuary was conceived by my friend David Alberto Fernandez, currently the town’s official poet laureate, as an outgrowth of our Vocal Takoma efforts. VT, as you may recall from previous posts, was that popup thing we did last fall to bring poems and songs out into the public realm, to show artists activating, visibly doing something. Normally it would be just a few of us at the downtown Takoma clock tower on a Sunday morning near the farmers market. We’ll be started up again shortly. Sanctuary expanded to a mighty lineup and brought it to the community center auditorium stage, as a benefit for CASA, a immigration advocacy and assistance organization based in Maryland.
I helped organize but the heavy lift was thanks to David leveraging his laureate status to get the city to help us. With a few exceptions, generally he found local poets and I found musicians, mostly from Takoma Park. We wanted to nurture and add to the town’s long reputation as a creative, socially conscious hotbed, and make it a strong platform to showcase local creative expression. The city not only let us use the stage, they promoted the event, ran sound/lights, and recorded the show. Brendan Smith, the head of the arts commission, was a great ally as always.
In dangerous times, the idea was to create a sense of sanctuary through art, a kind of sacred space of community, safety, and solidarity.
It was kind of a speed-round format, each performer was given basically one song/poem - ok, a few pushed it a bit - and we had the performers on stage the whole time while waiting their turn. It created a nice feeling of the performers being together with each other, and with the audience. Los Locos provided between-act ‘bridge’ music.
David and I performed a little chunk of our recent experimental hybrid, merging one of my songs and his poetry. (We did an extended 20-minute version recently at Musica Viva, my neighbor’s long-running classical music house concert series in Takoma Park.)
I had been hearing it was going to be a full house and it was indeed! I think the capacity is 150 and some people were standing.
A shout out to all the amazing poets and musicians who donated their time. No one was getting paid.
Nyle, the event photographer, took my recent six-week photo workshop. He’s a thoughtful guy and tremendous emerging photo talent. Definitely consider him if you’re looking for event coverage, as you can see he did a great job at capturing the vibe. Looks like The Last Waltz or something! We agreed he would shoot in black and white. Thanks Nyle, great job.
They are coming for culture, fam. But we are at the barricades defending it, helping art do its work of bringing us together. Starting where we are. And this was the first one but won’t be the last!
Drawing by Sofia for New World Voyage album art
What is future music, what do you mean, Bill?
Put simply, to me it’s music that carries us forward and helps us imagine a better future. Stories and ideas that look ahead more than back.
Music that doesn’t get trapped in the amber of various genres. I think genres are actually the enemy of future-music. Not because everything needs to be wildly experimental but overly revering any genre risks making it a kind of museum piece that you are simply mimicking.
I think the trick is to keep building on what has come before. My favorite music does that. I remember the first time hearing Sigur Ros, it was like they invented a new musical vocabulary where I didn’t always know where it was going but still felt richly rewarding. It evoked whole new landscapes in my mind.
Of course, future music will be different for everyone, music is so personal. Right now your inner voice might be piping up with the kinds of music you like. But it’s not so much about that per se, or music as comfort-food entertainment. Getting at the notion of future-music means learning to think about music differently. Being receptive to an artist’s vision and how it can crack you open to new possibilities, sort of like a good book does. Or photography, it totally ties in with how I teach photo ‘authorship’ based on personal vision.
These days we have the devaluation of music, creeping AI, and the general trend of music becoming simply a formulaic commodity. Too often artistry gets lost or overlooked.
So how can we expect music to carry us forward anymore? Who’s even doing it, what would that look like?
I had a great time exploring these questions on Thursday night, co-hosting a two-hour Takoma Radio show with the ‘Night Nurse’, Madona Tyler LeBlanc, and I performed a couple songs live in the studio at the end.
You can find it in the archives here if you’re so inclined. I’ll do a quick recap here while it’s fresh.
First we played and discussed samples from my own playlist, songs that feel like the future to me. Search ‘em up wherever you do music.
Dawning - Yasmin Williams
Yasmin is one of the most innovative and talented guitarists out there, a rising star (and she’s from the DC area!). In this track that virtuosity is put in service of a lovely spring-in-bloom sonic landscape. While she plays the likes of Newport Folk Festival, I would say she’s Exhibit A of future-folk, looking forward not backward.
Little Odessa - Eric Hilton (feat. The Infinite Daisy Chains)
Another DC stalwart, Eric is one of the co-founders of Thievery Corporation, who helped pioneer the lounge/electronica genre in the late 90s. So creating a new genre certainly puts you in the future-music category. But even within their electronica there was world-building going on, a cinematic international stew. As a solo artist Eric has been equally prolific. This track is just one example of his continued formidable vibe-conjuring prowess, this time in collab with fellow DMV-ers The Infinite Daisy Chains, who clearly can hold their own in the future-vibe department.
The Great Big Warehouse in the Sky - Petur Ben
Petur Ben, a fixture in the Reykjavik indie music scene, on one hand is just a guy with an acoustic guitar. But his finger-picking style is dynamic and unusual, as is his voice and songwriting. This song springs from his time in Ukraine, a poetic anthem of sorts for Ukrainian youth he met who use their underground club culture as a sanctuary from decades of crisis after crisis that cloud their future. It’s a good example of how a song can be topical yet not didactic or preachy.
Habibi (A Clear Black Line) - Loney Dear
Loney Dear is a Swedish singer-songwriter named Emil Svanängen, often dubbed Sweden’s Brian Wilson. In contrast with his more layered arrangements, this track is minimalistic, totally stripped down to his voice and piano. Voice bone-dry, no reverb, almost painfully intimate. Feels like a live take in a living room, which likely what it is. What really sets it apart is that it’s a song for immigrants, a plaintive call for more mercy and decency in how we welcome them. It’s a protest-song-as-lullaby, taking us forward by showing us how to get a point across and engage people in new ways.
There Are Several Alberts Here - Loney Dear
I including this one too as an example of his fuller arrangements. It leads off with random steampunk bleeps and blurbs. As it continues, with low chords swelling and mysterious reverb-drenched cracks and snaps in the distance, what emerges with the melody and chords is more like a power pop song in disguise, buried in the fog. Melancholic but quite catchy and astonishingly inventive.
Others that we didn’t get to but you might want to check out:
Fighter - ISAK (“women on the move, we fight for each other”)
Like Real People Do - Hozier (nature version)
Open the Light - Boards of Canada (the sonic equivalent of waking up in the future with a mix of hope and disorientation)
In the second hour we discussed my 2016 concept album New World Voyage, which I’m super proud of, as an example of future music of my own. In this case it’s literally *about* the future, the first humans to leave Earth forever for Mars. The sequence of tracks and album art suggests a loose story about what happens to them.
Images from the New World Voyage digital booklet
I generally think of my songs as future-folk, in this case the songs of the journey itself from the perspective of the crew. We played three tracks - Love Again, Echoes, and Feel - and talked about their roles in the narrative.
We ran short on time but I played two songs live. Feel, to show how I rearranged it for solo acoustic. And Heavenly, a song I wrote years ago in a band I was in but now fits well in my Mars suite.
The joke is that the world went to shit when David Bowie died, but there’s some truth to it. He was a good example of someone always pointing the way forward, toward something better, in interesting and humanistic ways. I don’t think we have enough of that now, and we’re hurting as a result.
More future-music might at least help us believe in the future again.
I’ve had a couple of fun shoots for local musicians recently, artist friends I like and admire tremendously. Lynn Veronneau and Ken Avis are the married couple of the outstanding world music (for lack of a better shorthand, sorry guys, I know you read this newsletter) group called Veronneau. I did promo photos for them many years ago, we caught up again last month at DC’s famed Blues Alley in Georgetown. In a twist, Lynn has also been taking my photo workshop lately!
Cory Seznec is another formidable talent and a great guy. I met him in an interesting circular sequence: last summer he reached out about possibly renting our open apartment, he and his family were expats in Paris coming to Takoma Park soon (he ended up renting a different house right across the street from the former childhood home of Takoma Park’s most famed guitar-son John Fahey - not an exaggeration to call Cory a worthy successor to Fahey). My daughter and I ended up in Paris while Cory was still there, so he invited me to play at an open mic on a beautiful canal boat where he was the featured performer. Now we’re both here and he’s taken part in our recent Vocal Takoma pop-up poetry-song events. He just finished recording a suite of songs at Tonal Park studio and wanted some documentation.
So I’ve been staying busy but pressure is building to get a proper job.
One problem is I’ve never really had to do a proper job search. The last time I was worried about it, when photo freelancing started faltering, a photo teaching job fell into my lap and I stayed fifteen years.
I got my first job at age 16 at Rodman’s, a general store near the house where I grew up, because I walked in and applied. In my salad days while playing in bands and going to college I worked as a Vespa courier in DC, in a record store, plus stints as an office temp, a doorman at a new wave nightclub, and a shipping clerk. Almost took the test to be a limo driver but didn’t go through with that. None of those were hard to come by.
Also almost joined the army at 18 and just barely got out of it by the skin of my teeth, that’s a whole other saga.
Briefly moved to London for music. Briefly taught English in Prague.
I finally gave up on bands and music, I just didn’t feel it was ever going to go anywhere. My father taught me photography and it became my marketable skill, my ticket.
For the most part, my working life as a photographer has fallen neatly into a few chunks:
Newspaper photojournalist. I did an unpaid internship for six months because I knew I would kick ass and they would give me a proper job, which I did and which they did. Three to five assignments a day, on hand-rolled Tri-X film, printed in the darkroom on deadline, captions taped to the back of the print as soon as it dried. Later we learned to scan our film for this new thing called Photoshop.
Freelance photographer. Later I shot for a lot of newspapers, like Patuxent Publishing and the Washington Post (thanks Lucian Perkins) in their photo heydays, later the New York Times and various European publications. Weddings, when ‘photojournalistic weddings’ were the new thing. For bands like Thievery Corporation. Made a decent living for over ten years. I developed long-term personal projects like my book The Waiting Room.
Photography teacher. In 2008, I was on a roll with an artist residency in Romania back-to-back with a solo exhibition in Warsaw. But when I got back from Europe the freelance landscape was looking dire and I had a two-year-old kid. Right on cue, an old friend called me about a full-time job opening teaching darkroom photography at a prestigious private school. I had never taught and wasn’t looking for that, but a week later I was working there. Teaching was certainly full of challenges but it was an amazing experience and I kept doing projects and various collabs on the side.
In 2023 I swallowed hard and finally left teaching when we moved to Nairobi, Kenya for my wife’s job. I wasn’t allowed to work there but did some unpaid photo workshops and mentoring in the Kibera slum.
Along the way, after 10-15 years of not touching my guitar, I was invited to join the band Dot Dash. I had to re-learn how to even play guitar, but after a few years I started to have ideas again so I left the band to make my solo album New World Voyage, a concept album about the first humans to leave Earth forever for Mars*. It’s more of an art project, it includes a 40-page booklet using my photos, some NASA photos, and a made-up ‘communications log’ to suggest the fate of my imagined space-faring crew.
*Spoiler: for me, going to a place that has zero of what humans need to survive is a terrible idea. I actually had a fairly lengthy debate about that with the bassist of Sigur Ros when I had the chance to meet them backstage a few years ago. He was of a more swashbuckling mindset about it.
I’m happy to have found my voice, literally/figuratively/creatively, in music. I still don’t expect it to ‘go anywhere’ but I love it and it’s intertwined in all kinds of ways with my other creative endeavors.
So here I am, now A Man of an (Un-)Certain Age, looking for work. What should I be doing? I admit I don’t quite know, feeling a little scattered.
Editorial freelancing isn’t what it used to be, and not sure I would go back to that. I shot a wedding in the Hudson Valley a few years ago and a bat mitzvah more recently for a former colleague’s daughter. Both went well, check my Events page. Guess I still got it. I did build my LinkedIn over many years, we’ll see what that brings now that I actually need it. While I’ll do whatever to keep the bills paid, hope I don’t have to become a barista or something.
With all that said, I’m really only interested in being useful in what I’m more and more calling the ‘fight for our humanity’.
For me, that’s the arts and culture. Arts education, art as community building, supporting artists. And of course doing my own art.
I’m just wrapping up my first in-person photo workshop, called See for Yourself, about developing your own creative vision. What I call authorship. To me that’s the only reason to do photography anymore. Hope to do the next installment soon.
I’m exploring other ways to use my refurbished garage studio as a gathering place, a creative hub.
Musically, I’ve been advocating for what I call ‘future folk’, or ‘folk futurism’. Which, yeah, is sort of what I try to do myself: stories that don’t look back but look forward. Imagining stories of the future so we can get there. I actually worry we have lost the capacity to imagine a positive future.
Stylistically, maybe even more than say blues or jazz or classical, the folk genre can be too trapped in amber, conjuring early Dylan, Woody Guthrie, et al. Or songs with overt, didactic messaging and a bit bound by ‘rules’ - and let’s face it, some often corny tropes. Which is a bit odd since Dylan shattered all the rules. This is not what I have in mind. I think of folk as broadly encompassing, innovative but still simply ‘people’s music’. I’m interested in whoever is doing that in new ways that carry us forward.
A new (future) folk movement, who’s onboard? I’ll be talking about that - and playing a few songs live - on Takoma Radio on January 29th from 7-9pm, co-hosting with the ‘Night Nurse’, Madona Tyler LeBlanc.
I can’t help but feel like the hollowing-out and diminishment of the arts is part of what has brought us to this point. Not that we ever fully win, but maybe art is what has been keeping the wolves of our nature at bay. There’s the joke that the world has gone to shit since David Bowie died but in a general sense there’s something to that. Maybe our art-heroes were in fact protecting us and pointing the way, as I often felt when I was younger. Not sure we really have that now and we see the result.
Where are the new heroes?
Dublin’s annual Christmas Eve Busk, to raise money for the Simon homeless charity, has become a pretty amazing tradition. It was started by the venerable Glen Hansard - the former busker who plays a busker in the wonderful film “Once” - and often includes the likes of Bono and Hozier alongside local stalwarts and up-and-comers like Allie Sherlock and The Belgian Blue.
I would say it’s not about the bigger names at all. (In fact I’ve read that Bono was nervous at the challenge of such a stripped-down public singing affair. He and Edge are maybe the stodgiest and most self-conscious of the various performers. Without making this about Bono, love or hate the guy, this year at the end of his appearance he signed off with a nonsensical burst of Polish mimicry. Really strange, not sure what to make of that. Check it out here at the 4:50 mark.)
As The Busk has grown from an impromptu DIY popup to a more polished event over time, what really carries it is the energy, warmth, openness, and spirit of both performers and spectators. Really something to behold.
We need more of this in the fight for our humanity.
I think it was off for a year or two during COVID but in 2021 they somehow did it in St Patrick’s Cathedral and wheeled in a very ill Shane McGowan for what would be his last hurrah.
Have a browse through these videos to get a sense of the shows and some nice behind the scenes vibes. The 2012 and 2015 clips are especially great and worth your time. Keep a lookout for the late Sinead O’Connor, having a grand (if slightly disjointed) time in the throngs of people. What a jolt seeing her!
Well that was a fun Sunday.
No newsletter this morning as I was getting ready for a full creative day today. This afternoon was the second session of my six-week in-person photo workshop, See For Yourself. Sorry, I was too locked-in teaching it to take photos, but it’s an awesome group and a great way to inaugurate my garage studio space. Next time I’ll try to take some BTS pics.
This morning before the workshop though was a new collab with some neighbors in Takoma Park. Vocal Takoma (aka VT) is like a pop-up song and poetry circle - or maybe a group busk but not for money - held in active public space. So for starters that meant near our Sunday morning farmers’ market.
VT was conceived by myself and my friend David Alberto Fernandez, who is the new poet laureate of Takoma Park. Yes, we have not only the coolest community radio station around, but a town poet laureate. We wanted a way for artists to come together and to show people art is still kicking. Instead of a venue we take it to where people already are. We want them to see and hear us, and take note that artists are activating, doing something a bit unexpected. Maybe a song/poem/spoken word circle sounds like kumbaya but I have to say while it’s fun there’s a steeliness to it as well.
The idea is a rotating, inclusive ensemble that will have some core participants but change from week to week and even have an open-mic component. We had a lot of interest from other local singers/musicians and poets but due to various conflicts the launch was just three poets - David, Claudia Gary, and Alan Abrams - plus me playing songs. It went very well and it was great to get it going. We did it totally acoustic, no amplification. Soapbox style. Which was a challenge to project but had a certain integrity and intimacy. Still, we’ll hopefully have a battery generator by next time so we can use a little amp, especially those with quieter voices.
While in a way VT is an art action for the times, it’s not directly or overly political. We feel like art doesn’t need to be - and maybe shouldn’t be - political to do its job. Sure, there’s some protest in there as well. Though via songs, poems, and spoken word, it’s just a way of asserting our voices - being Vocal - in support of life, art, our values, and our community. And a model for starting where we are.
A few beautiful moments happened along the way. The shop owner nearby brought out a portrait of her mother, who was a Turkish poet.
David Camero was in jester garb entertaining the kiddos near the spot we were using at the clock tower. We didn’t realize he was also a tremendous local artist and poet, he ended up shifting gears and taking a couple of turns with us.
Come by and check it out some Sunday (we may move to indoor spots as the weather turns). Or, better yet, bring a song or poem of your own.
One song I did was Fortune and Glory, written long ago by an old friend and a band I was in (The Mondays) recorded it. It’s among a batch of such ‘legacy songs’ I’ve been resurrecting, I think it translates well to our moment:
I know a thing or two
Yeah me and you
We just want the truth
And need much more
Than fortune and glory too
I think you can see
What you mean to me
In a world not free
Baby you're worth more
Than fortune and glory too
Right from the start
We knew we had understanding
The hardest part
Is knowing that our day will come
So don't lose heart
I admit my beard game has slipped since someone made this of me a couple months ago.
After playing in parks and open mics abroad over the summer to get fit, I’m back in the New World and excited to report I have a proper gig coming up. Am I ready to play for two hours? (Just flew in from Nairobi and boy are my arms tired, ba-da-boom-crash.) Guess we’ll find out!
‘Hey Bill, I don’t really know what kind of music you play.’ Good question, it doesn’t fit a neat genre. All original, I call it future-folk. I mean it’s indie rock of sorts played on acoustic guitar, not much actual folk in there. But they are songs that strive to reflect the times, carry us forward, and help imagine the future.
My musical ambitions are way different than when I was younger: now it’s not fame but the doing. Art at the community level. IRL. An element of storytelling. An element of art-warrioring in our current moment. The way making music makes me feel as a whole body-mind-spirit endeavor. And of course any shows should be nice and early, especially on a weeknight.
It’s also about resistance. As I’m reading right now in the book “How to Fall in Love with the Future”, artists must be part of imagining a positive future and helping us get there. I just read a part early on about a 95-year-old woman who was part of the French Resistance. She said her comrades had one thing in common:
“They were all optimists”.
If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll join me, I’m hoping to help activate Takoma Bev Co as a low-key music hub, in a 60s coffeehouse spirit. It’s perfect for it.
by Geertjan Cornelissen
My life has always been a push-and-pull between photography and making music. I’ve played in bands my whole life but solo-Bill started with my 2016 concept album New World Voyage, about the first people to leave Earth forever for Mars.
Spoiler: a terrible idea (Mars, not the album).
One song imagines the morning/mourning of departure, the crew getting their heads around the enormity of what they’re doing, of the whole human enterprise coming to this point:
I send my soul
Amended heart
I know there'll be a place for us
To start anew, I couldn't without you
From the shore
Through a forest of fallen gods
Is this the only path for us?
A way to pass through, on our way to You?
It’s a music album but also an art project. There’s a 40-page PDF booklet about their journey, using my photos, NASA photos, drawings by my daughter, and a ‘communications log’ suggesting more about their fate.
https://billcrandall.bandcamp.com/album/new-world-voyage
WAMU wrote about it at the time:
http://bandwidth.wamu.org/space-isnt-the-place-mistochord-scores-a-fraught-migration-to-mars/
I wondered who would do such a thing, leave Earth? I imagined one crew member as a formerly trafficked woman trying to get as far from her demons as possible:
Feeling a landslide
Bartered and sold
Once in a nighttime
Waits to be told
Wants to love again
To take control
Wants to break this ordinary hold
My thesis was the crew would be semi-deranged by the time they arrived, hallucinating and speaking in gibberish. Dealing with injuries or deaths or pregnancies on their one-way, months-long journey. But the biggest challenges being psychological as they grow increasingly numb and lose their shit:
Hold my face
Stood and found a laden dog
Cool eyes wait
Dead he said and walls that talk
I don’t know how much I care
I don’t know how much I can understand
One of my self-imposed concept parameters (ok, that we didn’t fully adhere to) was that it should be conceivable that the music you hear was made aboard the ship. Meaning they may have smuggled in a guitar or a mini-keyboard but there wouldn’t be, say, a drum kit. So for example any beats should sound like they were made by the ship itself, the mechanized environment.
We used public-domain recordings by NASA Voyager as a ‘bed’ to many tracks, so you feel like you’re onboard. Yes, I know, there’s no sound in space. The best way I can explain it is that as it hurtled past the planets, Voyager recorded space frequencies, the solar winds, that could be translated into audio.
Interestingly, different planets have different audio character. Mars sounds more sinister than Earth.
Then the big ‘now what?’ moment - how in the hell to strip away all those studio layers to play the songs live as solo acoustic, something I had little experience with. That’s been a learning curve, and still is.
The songs written since have been more ‘meanwhile back on Earth’, more grounded in love and solidarity in changing times. The underlying climate theme is hand-in-hand with creeping fascism:
Come and take me out of here
Come and take me slow
We’ll take our time as voices near the window
Cranes collapse and faults collide
Small boats are not safe
We’ll take the road at mud tide as you say
Lovers separated by war in Bosnia, as the waters rise:
Great green river cuts through the town
On its way forward
The past rushed over, submerged
You know I can’t quite find you
My breath is still inside you
A kind of storm
My newest song takes a more warrior stance:
Bring on another time another day
It may not soothe me
Open up my eyes to find a way
It don’t confuse me
Going in with eyes wide open
Gonna blow this thing wide open
My solo ‘career’ (cough) is now in roughly year ten, still gets me out of bed in the morning. Making any art is part being in the present and part creating the future. Standing up for the kind of world I want.
Yeah, I do use the word imagine a lot.
As bell hooks said, “What we cannot imagine cannot come into being”.
With my mom
Greetings from Nairobi.
If asked, I don’t really know how to describe what I generally post about. Sometimes it’s personal musings or updates, sometimes on photography in various ways, sometimes my music endeavors and various resistance-tech fixations. All are me trying to process life and ideas and share it out in ways that are hopefully interesting, relevant, and that respect your intelligence. To me, all have an undertow of mindful, art-based resistance, even if it’s not explicit.
Who knows if I’m doing it ‘right’? Maybe I should stay more focused. Or, maybe I need to mix it up more.
How would it look if I collected a couple weeks worth of stuff I’d normally post on social media and put it here? (That’s sort of what I was doing with my former Viaduct Arts newsletter, for those that subscribed to that. Viaduct was usually a compilation/digest of recent FB posts with a note from me at the top.)
What if you didn’t have to doomscroll on whatever platform to come across each individual post randomly, instead it all plopped as a bundle into your email on a Sunday morning?
It’s not a perfect experiment. Images seem to work best. I’m already discovering what wouldn’t work well in this space, like links, reels, anything not ‘evergreen’ enough to last more than a day. And of course it means you can’t comment or like the individual items.
There’s not as much to choose from since I like many others don’t post that much anymore, though FB is one of the few places I do. I barely look at Instagram, though it’s the only way to keep up with my Kenyan photographer friends. I dipped back into Threads the other day and it’s still way livelier discourse than Bluesky, which to my chagrin I’m beginning to give up on but I’ll leave that for another post.
In general I think the model of sharing broadly with strangers may be nearing a close. If there was a better way to share with friends and family that didn’t require wading through FB’s dreary AI slop or IG’s reels I’d sign up in a second. Otherwise I’m feeling a bit done. Anyone feel the same?
I’m more interested these days in what I’ve heard called the ‘cozy web’ - newsletters, groups, blogs. I’m liking good ol’ email, highly recommend Proton for the encryption. I’ve tried leaning into corresponding more substantively with a few friends via Signal, it’s been good. We’re so used to messaging being for quick hits, why not think of it like writing a more thoughtful letter or postcard?
Of course, I think many people are starting to remember that nothing beats in-person, real life interaction. And that might just be what saves us.
While on the subject of platforms, this is required reading about Substack. While it’s a place for valuable and interesting independent voices, it’s also a Nazi bar of sorts, comfortable enabling various creepy-crawlies:
How about more Tumblr-style? Just throw things out there. I know times are dire but maybe we are feeding the beast by focusing on it to the exclusion of all else. There has to be more to life than Wordle results and end-times fascism (aka ‘political’) news. Which I guess eliminates much of what I (and probably you) post on FB. Let me see what else I got.
A better idea than the real thing, though there are certain people I wouldn’t mind being flung into actual space.
Remember magazines? The late Stockholm New was an amazing once-yearly (!) culture/art/fashion mag that I used to collect in the before-times. Didn’t know there was a ‘best of’ book. (Though I’ll admit that cover image sure lands more toxically these days…)
It had beautiful minimalist design that I used in my Publication Design class. I sent it recently as inspo to a Kenyan friend who I’m helping develop a Nairobi art magazine.
I think mags like Kinfolk and Cereal were pretty heavily influenced by Stockholm New.
“I’m onboard with ‘clanker’ as a slur for robots and AI.”
Cool micro art shop in Haworth, England. All work by the artist-owner (no I didn’t take this pic, just came across it).
Samples from my World Landscapes print gallery.
“Wet Leg. Hell of a band (and band name). New album Moisturizer is the finest rock record I’ve heard in a while.”
“I had been reading good things about Superman. Ok, I saw it in French, which didn’t help. A lot I didn’t like but mainly methinks the director took the ‘let’s up the stakes by making him vulnerable’ thing too far. He spends the whole movie getting his ass kicked or crawling out from under the big thing that landed on him.”
"Personally I am very pessimistic. But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can't help but bless them for a good future. Because I can't tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn't have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making." - Hayao Miyazaki
This just in before I hit publish today, I’ll leave you with Robert Reich’s thoughts on Vaclav Havel and not letting the times suffocate us:
Havel had become politically active as poet, playwright, and dissident after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — which put him under the surveillance of the secret police. He was repeatedly jailed, the longest from 1979 to 1983. (In 1989, his Civic Forum party played a major part in the Velvet Revolution that ended Soviet dominance, and he was elected president shortly thereafter.)
While in jail, Havel wrote something that seems particularly relevant for us in these very dark times:
“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is a not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”
Paris Songwriters Club, photo by Jean-François Bellier
Sorry no newsletter the last two weeks. I found myself with nothing in particular to say and my bandwidth in Paris was taken up by a swirl of pending changes.
Time to go, for now, visa deadlines loom. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be back in Nairobi for a bit. If you can believe it, VOA’s final fate is still not resolved but nonetheless we expect to be home in the US soon enough, and we’re happy about that.
There are many things that I liked about Paris, maybe more than I used to.
The city seems to be doing great, pulsing with life and variety. There’s a better mood than I’ve sometimes found in the past. I even noticed the French people are a bit friendlier than I remember. Amazing how it’s become a biking city.
Believe it or not I didn’t come across much anti-American sentiment, or outrage about what’s going on in the US. They do ask about Trvmp, and occasionally Mvsk, but they are not nearly as obsessed as Americans are.
The French people I’ve interacted with seemed pretty chill, open, and interested in talking to an American (granted I do try to be a good brand-ambassador). I still sensed a respect for American culture, and maybe a desire for the US brand to not collapse entirely.
The young guy working at a cafe in our suburb came over and chatted me up in earnest for a good while and was profusely shaking my hand by the end.
The immigrant running the local pizza place said he once studied in DC and was quick to tell me he prefers life in the US.
On my way home after playing an open mic in Belleville, a young French-Arab-African (his description) guy across from me on the Metro started asking about my guitar and where I was from, we had a great three-station chat about music and life.
Waiting around before playing at the Paris Songwriters Club in Montmartre (see top photo), I overheard a French singer-songwriter say (non-sarcastically, I think) ‘oh shit, there are Americans here, I hope my songs are good enough’.
At our local cineplex, Superman was packed but I also went to well-attended one-off screenings of the original Blade Runner and Jaws.
At least some of the US soft power legacy seems to be holding for the moment.
No, in the end I didn’t take many photos. Never found my hook, and our daily life was much more in the burbs, not central Paris. For me personally the gift of time was a chance to work on music, almost like a self-residency. I think I got somewhere new, especially with my live performance fitness and confidence. I’m grateful for the chance to grow and for a lot of positive response. People seemed to care, many told me what I was doing resonated with them. Can’t ask for much more. The open mics - often several a week - were also a way of discovering cool parts of the city I didn’t really know before.
Just the other day I came across some great new pics of the one I played on a canal barge in Stalingrad in early July. Here are a few by their own photographer (as marked) plus a couple of mine to set the scene. Just a wonderful space and vibe.
It’s remarkable how art and culture are woven into the fabric of Paris life. A bit scary to think France is one of the only countries with global influence and power - even nukes - that still sees itself as a bastion of culture, design, ideas, and human values. There are dark rumblings and thugs on the march across Europe too, and the world’s biggest countries are all sort of a lost cause at the moment. It has occurred to me we may need France to carry the torch of idealism if the US falls further under the boot.
At my performances in Paris, I often started off by introducing myself as being from the US, along with some variation of:
“Rough times in America.” Then only half-jokingly, “We’re counting on you, France!”
As I wrote in my newsletter two Sundays ago, I’ve been playing outdoors here in France. I omitted one purely practical reason for doing so: we’re living in a suburban town out at the end of a RER train line (not Metro) and the last train from central Paris is around 9:30pm. So much for going out at night, including all the great open mic nights I had searched up around the city. If I wanted to play anywhere other than our apartment, outdoors it was, and during the day.
When we were first here there was RER maintenance going on for a couple weeks, so sometimes there wouldn’t be *any* train service on weekends and evenings, or there would be bus service adding at least an extra hour on the way home. Pretty brutal.
When you add the fact that the door-to-door journey itself is already an hour and a half each way, frankly we weren’t even going into Paris too often.
Then just over a week ago, everything changed.
On the way home from Paris one night I was pretty late for the last train and had already resigned myself to a pricey Uber. I decided to check the trains just in case and…
BOOM - late trains running! I’m still confused. New schedule since the repairs? Were they always there and I had it wrong?
In any case, since then I’ve been hitting the Paris open mic scene with a vengeance. This past week I did three nights in a row and might try for four next week.
You could play a different one every night and most nights there are multiple options. The level of musicians can be pretty high, but you get the whole gamut like open mics anywhere. Although I’ve seen a few people who clearly didn’t even know their songs, that was sort of strange. Maybe they were imploding with nerves, I saw that a couple times. One girl kept getting flustered, stopping, and fussing, ‘YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, I’M TRYING REALLY HARD!’. A young guy completely botched his cover of Blackbird but came back super strong for his second song, he had good chops.
He told me after, “I don’t know why I do that… I need to learn to get comfortable right away”. Right there with ya.
For starters, I had an offer to play an open mic on a canal barge in the Stalingrad area, at an occasional series called Sawmill Sessions at Peniche Anako. Great space, great sound, great audience, just quality all around. The limited open mic roster meant business, really top-notch (followed by a group jam, which is a common thing here). The featured performer who invited me was Cory Seznec - who is not only an incredible musician, singer, and performer with a strong following here, but by chance is moving to Takoma Park with his family shortly, so keep your eyes peeled for any shows.
Cory’s set was jam-packed (granted it was his sendoff show for his peeps). It got even more crowded after I took the shot below on the right, standing room only in the back. Amazingly it didn’t thin out too much for the open mic segment afterward.
Peniche Anako
I was up last (I think it was 8th). For the gearheads out there, I really enjoyed the Ear Trumpet stage mic, one of those you stand a bit back from, old-timey style. It was startling in its warmth and clarity. Cory got my second of two songs, a soft, restrained version of Love Again from my Mars album (the intro got clipped).
You know I hate these videos, I find them diminishing, but I’m trying to get over it.
Next up was the Paris Songwriters Club, hosted by an Irish expat downstairs at the Cave Cafe in Montmartre. I didn’t get any photos, sorry, but again it was a packed lineup and a full and diverse room. I’m hard on myself but I was happy to play pretty well, solid energy, and get a good response to the songs. I’ll be going back.
I talked my daughter into coming with me the next night to the Highlander, a Scottish (duh) pub right off Pont Neuf. Another medieval basement space.
Highlander pub
As I mentioned recently, I’ve been practicing an alternative set, reviving long-dormant originals by me and my mod-entourage from the old DC scene and reworking the songs for solo acoustic. The Highlander open mic would be the first time I would roll out a couple of them in front of people.
While they’re from such a different era and we were practically kids when we wrote them on our Rickenbacker guitars, I can’t help but think their blend of youthful hope and a certain grandiosity might make them the right kind of anthems for our current moment. What’s the expression, if something is out of fashion long enough it comes back?
My Own Interests (by The Generation)
In a distant land,
Where the borders reach into the sky,
I can take a stand,
With no fear, no need to question why.
I can make a plan,
A new design that needs no reason.
You can understand
Why the harvest comes in every season.
My own interests lie
In a place where no one bothers me
My own interests lie
In a place that only I can see
No light ahead
Just empty space where birds are riding
Full speed ahead
Only I can tell where the truth is hiding
Don't take my hand
If you know what's good
From what someone told you
No one understands
That a paradise is waiting for you
I got my daughter to record video and she did a great job. I flubbed a few lyrics, like swapping ‘stand’ and ‘plan’ in the intro verse. Yeah, still learning them, and the stage sound was pretty challenging so tbh this time I was in survival mode. But that’s part of why I do these, learning to survive anything.
Afterward I was down about it at first, it had sounded so terrible to me and felt like such a struggle. How it sounds out in the room is often very different though, so the video was actually reassuring. Part of the deal is how you cover any problems, so in that sense it was a win.
I usually make little notes for myself. “Overall not bad. Next time looser, more energy.”
Lastly, Thursday night was Tennessee Jazz, not far from Highlander. I was 12th on the list, out of around 20.
I don’t have pics or video of myself but here’s the scene:
Tennessee Jazz Club
When you talk about culture in Paris, this is one of the lesser-appreciated manifestations. People turn out for even the humblest - but surprisingly rewarding - of music events: the open mic.
If you see me on FB, you might wonder why I’ve been posting about playing outdoors in random places here in France. There are some practical reasons and more spiritual ones.
No I’m not busking. For one thing, I simply need to practice to keep and build my musical fitness. It goes away, fam, especially as you get older. I know that’s stating the obvious but I’ve never been a diligent practicer. Yes, I’ve played music for literally decades. But that was for bands, where you can hide, and I had lost my chops entirely for several years at one point when I basically gave up music. Solo is a totally different beast, it’s like I started over about nine years ago now.
Playing outside is daunting but I like it. Since for a while now I haven’t been in one place long enough to line up actual gigs, it’s sort of like the open mics I was doing around DC recently to stay in shape. It’s a big step up from practicing in your bedroom, because with any eyes and ears on you it adds that little bit of pressure that is helpful. You’ve got to bear down more. It’s like practice for your nerves as well, which I still have a slight problem with. I’m a growth-mindset type, it’s an ongoing process to get to where I want to be.
There’s something profound about placing your music out in the world, instead of in a closed-off venue. And doing it in a place like Paris becomes part of my explorations, sort of like with photography. I’m sniffing around for the right spot, the right time of day, the right situation, where I feel a certain comfort and connection with the surroundings. It’s a vibe thing, for me the camera is like a divining rod and so is this. Sometimes I pick for acoustics, underpasses are always good.
It’s led to memorable moments in the last couple days.
On Friday I played in a little park right behind Sacre-Coeur. People nearby here and there, of all ages, reading books (yep, there’s hope for the world) or quietly sitting around. Very peaceful on a perfect day weather-wise. I played for maybe an hour on one of the covered concrete benches, trying to add to rather than detract from the mood.
At least no one fled. One young guy was sitting on a bench across from me with his eyes closed for a good while, almost like he was meditating. He came up to me after, I said I hoped I wasn’t disturbing him.
“No, just the opposite” he said. “Are those your songs??”
Turns out he was a musician and had been digging it. He had kind, thoughtful, and insightful things to say about the melodies, chords, passion, etc but also just about creativity and life. Just an awesome guy, we talked for a good half hour. Made the whole day of lugging my guitar up and down the hills of Montmartre in the heat worth it. Classic case of ‘if you reach even one person’.
Then it happened again the next day.
Not at first. I went back to Montmartre but this time that same park didn’t work at all. It was just too hectic, even annoying.
When it started getting late I settled on a shaded little pocket park down the street. Kind of noisy, near a main road. It was partly a playground on one end, there were little kids charging around. I got sprayed by a water gun and one kid in diapers kept trying to smack my guitar.
Not ideal but I hung in there, shifting to my new alter-ego set - a revived compilation of originals written by me and/or certain friends spanning various bands we were in back in the long-ago DC scene (a slice of which I wrote about here). Plus a couple of covers. That material worked better - louder and more upbeat than my usual solo stuff which is fairly mellow.
Toward the end a couple of young French rock-and-roll types had stopped to watch as I bashed out a version of Smithers-Jones, a song my old band Modest Proposal used to cover. They seemed to like it.
“Super cool. Pink Floyd?” one asked.
“The Jam,” I answered. Blank stares. Oh well.
I had noticed a young art-nerdy girl sitting on the other side of the park was sketching me for a while. I went over to see if she would show me. She was super nice, she actually gave it to me, said “you play really well!”, and vanished.
Oh man, I’ll cherish this. All my tiredness and doubts fell away for the second straight day, once again all it took was that one person, one sweet interaction, to make it feel special. And this time suddenly the roles were flipped, I was the part of the visual landscape someone else chose to focus on. Pretty cool.
While I’m not taking photos much at the moment, this process and the little rewards that come from it feel similar.
[By now you might be thinking: um, video please? Maybe I will eventually in some form, but frankly I hate crappy little phone videos - of myself and others - and I don’t really have any gear whatsoever here to make it sound decent. Then the whole enterprise becomes something else, that will never do justice to the experience and the moment.]
Speaking of taking music out into the world, this is super cool, take a look. No, he’s not my beard-game inspo but I do love Loney Dear’s work. He’s like Sweden’s modern-day Brian Wilson.
I was considering this image for my Postcards from America, and it got me thinking. What DO you love?
Your loved ones, family, friends, your home of course. Your dreams and imaginings. Your work if you’re lucky. Your neighbors if you’re really lucky (as I am). For me, photography is about love. I can’t photograph what I hate, my shutter finger won’t activate.
I love a lot of things in other countries. Many places have quite lovely architecture and sensible social support systems. I’ve often felt I could live happily in this or that country. Kenya is tempting. Finland is a great place, must be nice if you’re Finnish. But as a visitor something is deeply lacking that is becoming more clear to me as I get older: it’s not home and never could be. Especially when you reach a certain age and home is so deeply embedded with life already lived.
Granted I’ve been living abroad, I’ve only been back a few weeks so I might be a bit misty. But in our budding spring I am reminded of a notion of love that is closer at hand.
I’m going to make an outrageous statement: I love this country, more than ever.
Even with everything going on. Because of everything going on. Yes it’s under siege from within. That makes me disgusted with those doing the siege-ing, not the place.
Yes these are deeply disturbing times. Yes I am still deeply critical of a long list of things, as I always have been. As a true American should be. Name a ‘great American’ who wasn’t on some level a contrarian.
In this country it's easy to forget the love part when there is much that repulses. But as we grow angry we also become indifferent or callous to our true bounty and potential.
How can you love a place where the soul-crushing never seems to end? This country can kill you, or let you die, without remorse. The people it rewards are so often the wrong ones, even the grotesque ones. The worst impulses are too often allowed to run amok. Freedom? In so many ways, this is not freedom. Quality of life? The US will never be, I dunno... Denmark. A country that has its basic act together for its people without huge pendulum swings.
But I love it anyway. I didn’t used to say that. Maybe now because it’s under such unique threat. Maybe it’s defiance talking, because it’s mine and I’m not letting these people destroy it. I’m not going to let the bastards take both the country AND my feelings about it. I’m not giving up on what it can be. That day might come but it’s not here yet.
I’m not talking about baseball or national parks or Hollywood. The things that have moved me after returning have been more everyday, local, and connected to my memories.
Sometimes just by going outside and moving around.
The cacophony of birds. My god. But not just the birds, generally - that one mockingbird (hey, he’s back as I write this) that reminds me of the baby mockingbirds we once found and built a little fort for in our yard. The mother would swoop down and feed them, until they disappeared after a few days.
The astonishing tree canopy. Not everywhere is so blessed. But not just trees generally - the ones we planted in our yard several years ago. We prepared the soil for a year before planting. Moving dirt around will bring you closer to your own patch of Earth. Ok, yeah, at the moment it’s a mess (hey, I’ve been away).
The woods nearby. Especially the area of the woods where we buried our dear departed guinea pig Seydi.
My childhood house that I passed recently with my mother. On its own it contains countless life moments.
The cool ‘hippo rocks’ I had to cross everyday on the way to school, that now feel like a shrine.
It helps that I like where I live now.
One night last week I was out for a walk. Passing a local music school after dark, the lights were on, it was open mic night and a good turnout at that. Great vibe.
(Speaking of open mics, I was part of a local Open Mic for Democracy event last week.)
photos by Eric Bond
Circling around a shabby house across the street that is a celebrated DIY art venue, I peeked in as an art-rock band in what was once a living room is nailing it for about a dozen people in what was once a dining room.
Down a darkened street in the historic district, lights emanated from the old, deeply American houses.
Over at the bookstore another night, an author talk about Ukraine. Where, oddly, I met a lovely family of Latvians living here. Talking about my time in Riga in the 90s, they actually knew one of the friends I made there. Wild.
Next door is the music store on one side and the funky local radio station on the other, next to a great recording studio. Music store > bookstore > radio station > recording studio. Damn. What a lineup for any town. If revolution breaks out, put the barricades there.
America is both an actual place and an imagined one we carry around in our heads.
Things in this country I usually carry in my own America-bubble: proper bagels, public libraries, Martin guitars, East Coast autumn, endlessly varied nature, everyday friendliness of people, indie coffeeshops.
When I dream forward I sometimes think of the Hudson Valley.
Of course there’s music and culture. Beyond the stars and obvious pop culture names, plenty are out there that still make America cool: Andre 3000, Beach House, Kishi Bashi, Patti Smith, Thievery Corporation. A radiant Tracy Chapman’s surprise 2024 Grammy appearance with Luke Combs still stirs.
Younger up and coming artists like Jesse Welles (that United Health song guy) and the DMV’s own Yasmin Williams (a new kind of guitar hero for this generation).
Author and commentator Rebecca Solnit has done much to buoy us in these times, and I’ve been discovering new independent voices like Marisa Kabas and Joan Westenberg. Our cinematic canon can still claim the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, and Jim Jarmusch.
This is just a small sampling. Your list will of course vary. I humbly suggest that you take a meditative moment to recall what you do love.
In these perilous times, you already know what you’re against. You will only truly fight for what you love. (Ask Ukraine.)
To be clear, I don’t forgive those who brought us to this dangerous point. My love is not about that.
It’s a weapon to defeat them.
Photo illustration by Bill Crandall
As of yesterday all staff at Voice of America have been put on administrative leave. Other entities like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia lost their funding.
What’s VOA? Not a dumb question if you’re in the US, as it has been radio and TV news for a global audience (hundreds of millions per week) and isn’t even available in the US except on the web. Read more on the background and yesterday’s announcement here. The Reuters story talks about ‘gutting’ VOA et al and how it is ‘unsalvageable’. Yet the article goes on to say VOA will be not destroyed outright but stripped to the bone, to the minimum required for basic functioning required by law. So I suppose they mean to put everyone on leave until they can decide what skeleton crew to bring back for a VOA fit for purpose, for the New Way. But that’s just speculation.
It’s a very sad day. VOA and Radio Free Europe are strictly not propaganda, no matter what anyone says. They were created to combat authoritarianism through independent, fact-based journalism. Bias is in fact not tolerated. For many in the world, they have long been respected, often the best source of quality, balanced news coverage in regions where that was in short supply.
Just a few days ago, before the hammer fell, I was in downtown Nairobi and had a chance to peek inside the famous Chester House, the old building where many of the big foreign news agencies were once headquartered for decades. All except one moved out years ago into new digs elsewhere, including VOA, but it was cool to see such a legendary place. It was also poignant, like a ghost of the past.
Voice of America in DC was just about ready to move from its aging headquarters near the Capitol into a sparkling new building that had been in the works for years. Last week it was deemed an example of waste.
REM’s “Radio Free Europe” has been my song of the day. Especially the bracing live version on their 1983 TV debut on Letterman. Energy crackling through them, especially guitarist Pete Buck who looks like he’s being electrocuted. Four dudes from Athens GA that shaped the musical landscape and the very image of America for decades.
Soft power. I’m with them.
~
Decide: defy the media too fast
Instead of pushing palaces to fall
Put that, put that, put that up your wall
That this isn't fortunate at all
Radio station: decide yourself
We're calling out in transit
Calling out in transit
Radio Free Europe