Which is exactly the impression I would get, in a few hours’ time, of the famed city of Las Vegas – a grouping of oddly shaped buildings unfurling out of a barren landscape, growing closer. A neon peacock glowing against the setting sun. The sky pink and orange and a gradient of blue. A streak of wispy, misplaced clouds floating overhead, clearing, making way for the shimmering wonder of excess. The sight of it, the sheer beauty of engineered lights as they challenged the sun, is a kind of hubris I will never forget.

***

Journal entry, dated 09/15/21:

Wednesday. Very early morning. Las Vegas.

From inside this hotel room, with the [sun] screen down, the outside could be Tokyo or some major city in Singapore. I am on the 21st floor, which gives me a mid-line view of the towering buildings around me. From where I am on the bed, I cannot even make out the tops of the buildings. All I see are lit windows, tiny, neatly organized squares. Some are colored (there is an advertisement for something moving beyond the screen, I can make out the color and the movement, but not what I am being sold), but most are neutral white or beige.

Vegas is such a raw city. When I am here, I feel that I am closest to understanding what cities are – made up places. The caricature of this place allows me to consider the realness of other places – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin. No city feels the same as another. And no city reminds me just as much as Las Vegas that all these places are manmade shrines to existence.

***

I have resisted having a crush on Las Vegas for a long time for reasons that are wholly legitimate: Vegas is a tourist trap of poor behavior, which is less than appealing when you are there in a professional capacity, as professional as ‘live event industry gig’ can possibly be. The crowds, a methodical lack of windows, the price of food, the weaponization of music playing 24/7 in elevators and lobbies and from speakers hidden behind plants, the overt over-sexualization of all things — these are the aspects of being in Las Vegas I could do without. It is a place where people are encouraged to be some other version of themselves, where there are supposedly no consequences for actions because of the promise that what happens here, stays here. Even the skyline is in on it, with casinos – New York-New York, Paris Las Vegas, The Venetian – parading as caricatures of their namesakes. The mental games being played in Vegas are strung out in plain view up and down Las Vegas Blvd. The vibe is one big party where everyone is invited to play the part of their alter ego.

Yet, despite all the ugly complication, it is a fascinating place with a fascinating history. The story of Las Vegas is the story of the American ethos, of promise and perseverance, of good natural resources and the influx of settlers that would follow. Between the railroad and a now-famous dam, Las Vegas became home-away-from-home for an entire sector of laborers in the early 1900s as they quite literally built the West. Not to mention legalized gambling, organized crime, prostitution – in Las Vegas, there was no shortage of industry.

My relationship to this place falls weirdly in line with this founding history – I, too, have only ever known Vegas as a work destination that holds some undefined possibility of progress. My first freelance job out of college was here — a broadcast show out of the Grand Garden Arena — where I was awake for over 24hrs between the show, the load out, and the airport shuttle. Brutal, yes, but so was building the Union Pacific Railroad. So is any job where you're unsure of what you're doing, or if you'll fit in, or if you'll be any good. And then to do it all so far from home?

But as it goes, for a 22-year-old, it was the best gig ever: I had been the given a chance. And by some measure, it worked out – I have been back in Las Vegas working nearly every year since. Roll of the dice. Luck of the draw.

***

This is the only time I travel away from Las Vegas by car: after the load out, overnight, in a 12-passenger van headed to Los Angeles, so we make the load in at the Forum the next day. There are only 4 of us traveling West, so in theory the 12-passenger provides enough room for each of us to stretch out and sleep, which is only practical in theory. I am the youngest on the crew, so I am stuck with the back row because "young guys in the back." Again, this is fine, in theory, but the reality is there is no such thing as sleep in the back row of a 12-passenger van at 2am, with your backpack as your pillow.

The desert sky is piercingly clear, and there are stars, millions and millions of stars. The mountains are cloaked in shadow, their mass hidden in darkness, a haunting presence. I am listening to the new Death Cab for Cutie album, from top to bottom, as is the custom for those born in the 90s. And although Asphalt Meadows was released a week ago, the ride feels more like Transatlanticism days, where instead of this crew van, I am in my parent's minivan on some road trip consumed by Ben Gibbard's voice, wondering about the 405. Wondering where on Earth there is a highway called the 405.

Somewhere in the distance, in the early morning light, Los Angeles appears, and I consider how strange it is to be here. Right now, in this van.

***

Journal entry, dated 09/21/22:

Again in Vegas, on the 9th floor of the Park MGM, where I am compelled to write because the view of the sunrise and far away mountains with great, fluorescent structures in the foreground is one of the most stark representations of human and natural conflict I have ever witnessed.

When I lay on the bed at night, the incessant flashing of the New York-New York casino hits me at eye level. I consider the irony of having just landed from JFK, to then end my day being annoyed by a replica sign that, to my knowledge, does not actually exist in the city of New York. Albeit the sign is here to evoke the "feeling of New York," a longing for a place you may or may not have been. This is the feeling of Las Vegas – a place of multiple identities, replicas of actual identities, a mirage.

I understand the appeal. The desert is, after all, a magical place. I feel that magic every early morning when I am still on East Coast time. This transition, which only takes a day or two, is my favorite part of Las Vegas because it turns me into someone I am not – someone who wakes at 4:30am and immediately starts writing. By 7am in New York, I am late. In Vegas, I am early. Or, I have never gone to bed.

***

I write this as I wipe Las Vegas dust from the wheels of my Pelican; it rained on the final day, and the walk back to the hotel was gritty and wet. Caked into nooks and crannies are the remanence of yet another trip, every memory a grain of desert sand – an early morning run along The Strip, a last call round at the whiskey bar in the MGM, a hike at Red Rock Canyon on a dark day, the lizard statue in LAS – gathering at the bottom of an hour glass.

Back in New York, I consider that I have been changed by Las Vegas, or perhaps, I become most aware of my own change every time I am there, every time I return. I consider that I am beholden to Vegas’ most famous export – the feeling of luck.

— caro.

Listening to:

The song from my memory, which turns out is not, in fact, on Transatlanticism. Memories – pesky and inaccurate!

Also, another banger from the early 2000s, inspired by the article I link to below:

Reading:

If you only read one thing, please treat yourself with this one: A Place in the Sun by Jennifer Haigh. It’s a short story I re-read at least once a year. Spoiler: it takes place in Las Vegas.

Otherwise, I caught up on a long list of reading, including this excellent piece on "vibes" and the implication of AI, the Daniel Nigro NYT feature, remembering (and kind of missing?) my short few years spent commuting on Metro-North, an article about work (Hi Jeremy!), and a brilliant Dirt piece on what going out in NY feels like after turning 30.

In terms of books, I just finished Brian Dillion's Essayism (an Alicia Kennedy rec from a long time ago), and The Pole, which was a random buy from McNally Jackson at Rockefeller Center. A short, lingering, entertaining read.

You can find a Bookshop.org list of recommended books from my posts here.

Happy weekend everyone!

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I remember this vividly because it was both earnest and funny — a joke, but also a serious plea to be excused from our domestic lives. The night before was all surprise photoshoots at the Williamsburg waterfront and rooftop sunset drinks with friends. By morning, we were back to reckoning with the day-to-day. Our status had changed overnight, but the laundry remained. How quickly the romance bubble bursts!

I mean romance here in the figurative sense — ours is fully intact, as is the state of the hamper. I use the word ‘romance’ when considering ideals, namely our ideal wishes, desires, and dreams, because being attracted to the idea of something feels much like a real world attraction. The idea, the possibility, is lovely to think about, intriguing, and compelling enough to make your palms sweat.

Everyone is a little smitten by something. My romance, for example, involves becoming a sound engineer as a means of seeing my favorite bands play every night for the rest of my life. Or, I sit down and pen the next great collection of essays, á la Thoreau (written all by hand, with my favorite pen, no revision necessary). To use a modern term, these are my ‘Instagram,’ my ‘reality’ resembles the normalcy of daily life: I can count the number of times I have worked with favorite musicians on only one hand, and my magnum opus is likely this Substack, which comes with far less ease than my romantic notion wants to believe (and is also completed 100% from behind a screen).

I first internalized the romance/reality dichotomy in college, in a creative writing class, no less. Looking back on it now, I find this interesting because I was a music major, and music school might as well be ground zero for the romance/reality clash. Nevertheless, it took a writing class for me to better understand this universal balancing act. In John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, a book I was assigned my sophomore year, and still reference to this day, Gardner talks through the elements that make a young aspiring writer a professional. His writing is matter of fact, yet somehow, he both heightens and lays bare the romance of writing with tidbits that apply to any craft. The spine of my copy of the book falls open to the book's final section "Faith", to a page that is both bracketed and check marked in the margins:

What is the writer to do? I think the answer is, given the writer's linguistic competence: Have faith. First, recognize that the art of writing is immensely more difficult than the beginning writer may at first believe but in the end can be mastered by anyone willing to do the work. Good writing involves the operation of many mental processes at once, and in the beginning one must deal with those many processes one at a time, breaking down the total job into its smallest segments…

The essence here is not exclusive to writing, which Gardner goes on to recognize:

Second, trust that what works for other human activities will work for the activity of writing. Learning to ride a bicycle, one must learn to steer, learn to keep one's balance, learn to push the pedals, learn to stop without falling — all separate processes requiring separate focuses of concentration. Eventually they become one process.

And of course, on the topic of writer's block:

Since the problem of the writer unable to concentrate on the fictive dream or respond flexibly to the impulses of language is essentially a problem of inhibition, or the mind defeating itself, all of the conventional forms of breaking inhibition can be employed to get things rolling — self-hypnosis, TM, drunkenness and smoking, or falling in love. None of them are effective in the absence of hard work and occasional successes.

I feel the romance/reality disconnect as an inhibition, a kind of frustration between what we desire and what is required of us to live and exist. It can take many forms, like feeling uninspired and beaten down by reality, or wavering directionless in a day dream of possibilities and indecision. But the sentiment here is that the inhibition can be overcome, with hard work and a little "getting out of your own way" one might say. It is a process, this contending with romance and reality. Somewhere in between the dream and the day-to-day exists our lives — this great managing of expectations becomes our life’s work.

All this to say, it has been awhile since I have last published here. For those who are more recent subscribers, welcome and thanks for following along. Life has been filled with tending to the romance and living the reality, which is to say, it is being lived.

— caro.

Listening to:

All Born Screaming, but particularly this song, which is the first song all year that shocked me awake (literally, I was dozing off on a plane). Stick around for the horn intro on "Violent Times,"  🤌🏽.

And to my friend Maddie Rice's new song, which came out May 1. Shout out to her for gifting me the little green notebook you see up in the picture of this post, thanks girl! :

Reading:

Finishing Aleksandar Hemon's My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You, which has already made me cry. Sunday's Maybe Baby on routines…

Maybe Baby

#179: Beyond routines

I’ve spent most of my life dreaming up routines that might finally stick. When I do something “good” for myself, like practice yoga or prepare a nice breakfast, I often think, I should do this every day. When I meet friends for lunch and find it energizing, I say, “We should do this every week!” During most vacations I’ve taken, I’ve spent at least a po…

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2 years ago · 237 likes · Haley Nahman

…and an analysis of a poem about a sound check, which I have been dying to share since I read it weeks ago:

Ordinary Plots: Meditations on Poems + Verse

Peter Cole's "Can You Hear Me?"

Can You Hear Me?Can you hear me? There at the back, yes? Testing 1, 2, 3…? This is working? Great. Everything’s working? Great. Just checking— you never know what exactly’s getting through, do you? It’s a little like the day, years ago, I was on a radio show…

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2 years ago · 23 likes · 3 comments · Devin Kelly

You can find a Bookshop.org list of recommended books from my posts here.

Watching:

The CBS Sunday Morning clip about the popularity of watching shows with captions turned on, which is too relevant for those who are music/audio/television adjacent not to share. Team no captions — put a sheet over that bird's cage and actually listen!

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I stopped in the library to pick up a copy of Ursula Le Guin’s No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters. The book is actually a series of blog-post vignettes published late in her life. The spry anecdotes are about getting older, writing, feminism, her cat, about thinking and interacting with the natural and social structure of the world as an octogenarian. Le Guin’s defense of spare time, prompted in response to a Harvard alumni questionnaire, is probably the most quoted of the blogs in the book, which is understandable considering it makes for an eloquent argument against productivity culture and obsessive time management:

…I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.

Le Guin writes this on the eve of her birthday as I read it on the eve of mine. In the time since I last published one of these missives, I too will have had a birthday, I too will have grown quantitatively older. A birthday is an invitation to think about time, how it passes, how I’m spending it, how I have been changed by it. It is also an invitation to party — you’ve navigated the complicated incredibleness of being alive for another year. Have a beer! (or two.)

In considering this passage of time, I think about the factors that influence its interpretation. What is time anyway, other than recognizing that a change has taken place, from day-to-day, year-to-year? Our ability to mark change is affected and manipulated constantly, by the seasons, by moods, by being caught off guard, by learning new information, by an infinite amount of distraction. We feel that time has passed, or not, based on how we feel. The body responds to signals that things are not as they were before.

The most profound book I’ve read all year is a deep dive into this perception of time. In Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman distills the theories and writings about the subject of time from philosophers, psychologists, and thinkers and makes a case for accepting and living by the reality of our limited amount of existence. This existence, this being, “is totally, utterly bound up with our finite time,” he writes, “So bound up, in fact, that the two are synonymous: to be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally, in the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet unable to know when.” To be, in Burkeman’s interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s writing about time, is “to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us.” If we are time, then the body, it seems, is its ultimate keeper. We internalize this constant propulsion, there is no extra to be found.

Every couple of weeks, the sidewalk sign in front of the coffee shop on the way to the subway changes — a neighborhood signal that time is passing. This month, it reads: "Chapter 5 of 12. Put some spring in your step!" A steaming cup of coffee and some flowers are drawn in chalk around the kitschy saying, the ‘chapter 5’ insinuating this month, May. I think about what took place in chapters 1 through 4 — the exposition, the character introductions, the rising action. I wonder, too, what happens on the final page of this book that is metaphor for this year. I wonder, but not obsessively. This is the living of life, after all, with nothing to spare.

— caro.

Listening to:

The entire album, really, but I keep returning to this song in particular because it feels ironic and timely given circumstances.

Also, mildly disappointed that Apple Music links don’t embed here the way Spotify links do. I’ve been listening to Apple Music a lot more lately, the quality sounds better to my ear.

Reading:

The highlights of the last few months: an incredible feature about issuing birth and death certificates in rural Colombia, an essay about old wives’ tales that I read while sitting on a rock in Runyon Canyon Park in LA, the widely circulated ‘End of the English Major’ article from The New Yorker, which made me wish I had been an English major. More English major themed content to fuel this fantasy:

The Honest Broker

The 4 Types of College Papers for English Majors

Let me start with a story. The year is 1982, and I’m a grad student interviewing for a job at a very high-powered Silicon Valley company. It’s a company that everybody knows with a famous CEO. It is (by reputation) a very desirable place to work. But the interviewer is a blunt, crass man. He spends the entire interview insulting me. In fact, I’ve just s…

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3 years ago · 363 likes · 89 comments · Ted Gioia

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So to finish all 12 stories in one sitting, especially sitting on a plane (a place that I have learned to approach with lowered expectations), was wholly unexpected. I have read and adored both Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude – the latter I finished a handful of years ago on yet another flight, the remainder of which I spent staring through the clouds, suspended in a deeply strange kind of afterglow. I recognized the world of Márquez’ writing immediately, his signature realismo mágico thinning the veil between fantasy and reality. To consume it in short form feels akin to eating a cotton candy grape – a spectacular, seemingly unbelievable burst.

I remember reading an essay on craft at some point in college that praised the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude as being the greatest opening sentence ever written. (Here is a different essay in a similar vein.) For context, that opening line is:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Indeed, it is a sentence that contains multitudes (How does one 'discover' ice? Why is he facing a firing squad?), but in reading 12 other Márquez opening lines, I realize that One Hundred Years... was no fluke, the man was simply a master craftsman of the opening sentence. He was able to accomplish with stunning consistency what all first sentences strive to do: propel the audience head-first into a story, no questions asked, no choice but onward.

In revisiting Márquez’ work, I am reminded of the tender beauty in returning to art that resonated with ourselves in the past. A favorite author, or artist, or musician, or photograph – in these moments we are renewed, soothed by familiarity, invigorated again. The experience of revisiting permits for a moment of personal reflection, an examination of identity. There is a portion of the 'Lyrics' chapter in Rogers and Ogas' This is What It Sounds Like that applies well here:

Personal identity is a dynamic phenomenon. It changes across time and circumstances...Music, and lyrics in particular, serve as a kind of encyclopedia of personas for us to explore and adopt.

If lyrics serve as 'an encyclopedia of personas', then it seems natural that written word invokes a similar exploration of the self – Who was I the first time I read this? Do I still recognize that part of myself? Art requires that we ask these questions of ourselves every time we put ourselves in its path. The answer is always changed by circumstance, the experience of art and of the self a uniquely 'dynamic phenomenon.'

All this to say that I had missed Gabo without realizing, whichever part of myself that was attracted to his writing is still intact. I am glad to have picked this tiny book off the shelf, its text like some latent memory resurfaced. Familiar but new, the feeling of looking through water knowing your gaze has been skewed but bestowed with intangible sparkle. A heightened sense of shimmer.

— caro.

Listening to:

Bad Bunny, because Grammy’s opening performance (which I am unable to find in its entirety on YouTube):

And through proxy, lots of salsa:

Reading:

Oh, I’m on a bit of streak since the holiday break. This article about eating in the Cartagena region that hit my feed as I was boarding the plane, which of course I understood to be a sign. Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary is so tiny (104 pages!) but so touching. A meatier but philosophically-juicy Sex and Sensibility from The Point, a journal that has the ability to make me feel like I’m back in an honors litcrit class (a good thing if that was not already obvious). And a recommendation (thanks, Ho) about the impact of winning or losing a Grammy on artists and the industry as a whole, relevant since I worked on the broadcast at the beginning of the month.

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These are my final words of 2022 before an extended holiday break that I will use to spend time with family and friends, rest, catch up on reading, and work on material.

Wishing you all a wonderful holiday and a peaceful New Year ✨

The final match of the 2022 World Cup will be played on Sunday in Lusail, Qatar between Argentina and defending World Cup champions, France. A great percentage of the Earth's population will watch, including us here in New York. Inevitably, for at least 90 minutes, all will be captivated by the world's most popular sport.

This year's iteration will be remembered as one of the most ethically complicated sporting events to navigate — more than once in the last month I have wondered if my own love of the game might collapse under the weight of controversy. The drama surrounding the Qatar bid has been ongoing for nearly half of my life, and has managed to bubble over spectacularly as the start drew near. Two days before the opening match, I stumbled upon coverage of spectator accommodations reminiscent of Fyre Fest, and immediately texted a friend in exasperation: “Ugh I hate saying this / World Cup is gonna be a shitshow isn’t it.”

Yet, somehow, the play is still as good as I remember — amid fanfare and drama, upsets and controversy, soccer has managed to survive. I was raised a fan of soccer by my father, whose devotion to the sport is a cornerstone of his immigrant experience, a love that knows no borders. Interest in sports is commonly passed down in this way, through proxy, over time. In the introduction for the first essay of Atlantic's World Cup newsletter The Great Game, Clint Smith describes his current relationship with the game as a father "who is now watching my two children fall in love with the game I have loved for so much of my life." This phenomena is part of what makes World Cup soccer fandom so compelling: that our passion can be passed onto future generations and validated by those we love most.

Sunday's game will mark the eighth World Cup final to take place in my lifetime. I am stunned by this statistic, more so when I consider that a quadrennial sporting event can provide a point of reference for moments of my life. In 1994, waving to my father as he caught a ride to Foxboro Stadium to see Italy play (his friends were Italian, he was tagging along). Watching Brazil win the 2002 title, at home on the basement television, when I first learned that tears can be shed out of happiness – Brazil being my father's favorite team. Again in the basement in 2010, this time with my friends, watching vuvuzelas being played in the South African stands while we cheered for Spain, who would go on to win the cup. There are so many years in between, so much of life celebrated in the sliver of a 90 minute stretch.

Never once in all this time has being a fan of the game meant being a fan of FIFA, in spite of the latter gatekeeping a sport played and enjoyed by the common class, predominately by the poor. On pavement, on grass, on sand, with or without shoes — soccer meets the people wherever they are, across continents and cultural divides. The essence of the beautiful game is what it reminds us about the ongoing game of life: that someday, you will be called to the pitch, where you will pull a jersey over your head, reach down and touch the grass, look to the sky and mouth a prayer to your deity of choice. The whistle will blow, you will breath in deep, and despite everything — every doubt, every controversy — you will settle your mind.

You will dash forward into the future. You will play on.

— caro.

Listening to:

An album that was “now playing” at Rough Trade some many months ago that I spent at least two days finding in my library on Spotify. Did you know using the heart button no longer puts the entire album on your “Liked Songs” list? Clearly I didn’t, sucks to suck.

Reading:

Excellent discourse on the World Cup, specifically an essay comparing soccer to dance, and New Yorker features like this and this. Still SELLOUT, but also an essay collection by The Point Magazine, which makes me miss being in honors English.

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Three days prior, I was in the parking lot of the Animal Emergency Center in Watsontown, PA waiting to admit Hero — my two year old tabby rescue — who started showing signs of a urinary infection that morning. A urinalysis, blood test, some antibiotics, and a couple hundred dollars later, humans and creature were headed home emotionally and physically drained, but otherwise fine.

Hero was not the cat that we were looking for. No, in December of 2020 we were seeking a little orange kitten, a ginger, or some variation there of (the best way to explain this search criteria is to say there are a humorous amount of redheads in our life and continuing the trend with a prospective cat would have been an inside joke that landed brilliantly). After months of stalking Whiskers-a-GoGo’s Instagram, a derpy, 4 month-old calico appeared, so I filled and submitted the adoption application nearly immediately. And, in the way of modern things, nearly immediate wasn’t enough. Another application had been accepted, but would we consider a 4-month old tabby instead? Aesthetics be damned, the answer, of course, was yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Part of the great beauty and mystery of life is the unknown factor of personality, a humanesque quality that applies wholly to the experience of adopting a pet. Those with actual human children can attest, and those with cats — or dogs, birds, horses, rabbits — know too what it’s like to be intimately acquainted with a personality outside of your own. There is a saying about "not getting to choose your family" that applies here as well: while we knew we wanted a cat, we did not know what kind of cat we were going to get. We did not know he would play fetch, or prefer to drink water that has been freshly drawn from the tap. Or that he would anxiously watch us pack our suitcases and set them by the door, in a pensive, quiet way that tells us he knows travel is imminent. The list of quirks goes on, the depth of personality far deeper than the word pet can contain.

This lacking of language is exactly the rub, as Sarah Zhang writes:

Our very language is inadequate: They are not simply property, as pet owner implies, nor are they fully equivalent to children, as pet parent implies. They occupy a space in between. What do we owe these animals in our care—these living creatures that have their own wants and wills but cannot always express them? And what does what we think we owe them say about us?

I do not know if I would do the kidney transplant, this is partially why I am crying. But when I think back to how we dropped everything and rushed to the clinic, I recognize the desire to do something, to prevent even one small disaster in a world of seemingly endless disaster. All so Hero can go on living a charmed life, napping in the front window bed, perking his ears to the sound of my keys as I walk down the block, suck back the tears, and rush up to meet him.

— caro.

Listening to:

Tis the season:

Reading:

This little piece about crying on public transit, which is totally on point, and published by a publication named after a bridge you can sort of see from my house. Source: the excellent Haley Nahman. Starting Dan Ozzi’s SELLOUT, which is a bit of a trigger word for me. But speaking of My Chem…

Published:

Saw L.S. Dunes at Music Hall of Williamsburg and wrote about it for NYLive.

The conversations that weekend were varied, but seemed to circle back, again and again, to a collective sentiment of feeling underwhelmed, unengaged, and low-key burnt out. At some point, someone expressed that they were "thinking of other things" for the first time in their professional life — other things being a significant career change. The phrase, and the loose, wishful-thinking feel of it has been stuck in my head since. Thinking of other things — like returning to a daydream or relishing in a fantasy. Much is expressed in this vague and wispy little phrase.

For friends across multiple industries with various types of work arrangements to feel so similarly about their careers suggests a generational change, one that appears more nuanced than trendy discussions of The Great Resignation (or renegotiation?) or quiet quitting. For those who were beginning careers in or preparing to enter the workforce at the turn of the millennium, the growing despondency toward work sounds a little more like a tired "now what?" that is being asked of ourselves and each other. A good friend once referred to this unspoken rub as "the new guy" on the job, personifying the uninvited party to portray how different the workplace felt, despite a "return to normal."

The underpinning of this frustration is years in the making, a short list of the myriad of factors appeared in a New York Times essay from 2019:

An entire generation was raised to expect that good grades and extracurricular overachievement would reward them with fulfilling jobs that feed their passions. Instead, they wound up with precarious, meaningless work and a mountain of student loan debt.

(For what I consider to be the seminal “paper” on millennial burnout, see here.)

Perhaps what we are experiencing now is the whiplash of "performative workaholism" falling so suddenly out of favor. It is no coincidence that a generation of people who were encouraged to turn what they love into careers would feel this way now — a mixture of uncertainty and disappointment — when considering how disproportionate the “hustle” of their young lives feels when compared to where they currently are: at a point in history when the style of work that once defined a generation is no longer on trend. To contemplate other things is to contemplate leaving behind an identity that was once vehemently guarded and tirelessly shaped. Now, a job can be "just" a job, but is there, or will there, be anything left to show of who we were before? In typical millennial fashion, even changing careers is a kind of identity. We have done the work once before, are we really willing to do it again?

Realizing that these strange, complicated feelings are a communal struggle is a solace as much as it is an indication of a collective shift in opinions. With the amount of situations in life and around the world that are beyond control, the fact that we are willing and able to consider change is extremely fortunate and deserves some healthy gratitude (theme of the week, be thankful.) There was an excellent Willa Cather quote floating around recently that partially inspired this collection of thoughts:

It’s so foolish to live (which is always trouble enough) and not to save your soul. It’s so foolish to lose your real pleasures for the supposed pleasures of the chase — or of the stock exchange.

Maybe this is the feeling of a generation trying to save their souls.

— caro.

Listening to:

This, on repeat, while dancing at my cat:

Reading:

Reading The Search for the Perfect Sound from the Washington Post, which also turned into me drooling over the design on this webpage. Give these designers a Webby!

In an effort to bolster the archives, I am reposting a concert review that originally appeared on NYLive.org, August 20th, 2022. Enjoy.

Standing in GA at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, NY, the breeze was soothing, even chilly in moments, not unlike an August evening Upstate when summer starts to give, and we are reminded that seasons change. After a stretch of blistering hot days in New York, the humidity broke, and the city seemed to sigh in relief. A reminiscent autumn chill is fitting for a Fleet Foxes concert, especially on the closing night of the North American tour supporting the well-received Shore, the album whose release coincided with the 2020 autumnal equinox. A few seasons delayed, but here we were to celebrate, to sigh with a sense of relief.

I was struck initially by how empty the stadium seemed, even up to the moment that Robin Pecknold and band – a 9 piece ensemble including New York brass quartet The Westerlies – walked on stage. In the flurry of post-lock down concert hype I expected sold-out energy, but looking back, that vibe would have been too much for a show opened with “Wading in Waist-High Water,” featuring Shore collaborator and tour opener Uwade on vocals. By “Can I Believe You,” the crowd consolidated, with those on the outskirts filling into seats with better sight lines, primed to sing along to indie classics like “He Doesn’t Know Why” and “White Winter Hymnal.”

In terms of music, this was the show I was expecting. Pecknold’s folky confessional songwriting style is fully recognized by the band’s vocal harmony and orchestration. Being in front of a stage filled with people playing actual instruments still feels special, no doubt fueled partially by the absence of this spectacle in the last few years. But I could not help but notice how the staging felt small – the video screen, the lighting elements, the band’s physical footprint onstage. The most impressive moments of the night were a string of acoustic numbers (“Blue Spotted Tail,” “If You Need To, Keep Time on Me”) featuring only Robin and guitar. When Robin stopped briefly during a Judee Sill cover of the “The Kiss” to check on a distressed audience member, I wondered if a smaller, indoor show would have translated better, or helped bridge my personal gap between expectation and reality.

But navigating the muddy in-between of expectation and reality is exactly where Fleet Foxes’ music is best suited, and how they have come to run in the same circles as Bon Iver, Aaron Dessner, and famously, Post Malone. Watching the band cover The Strokes’ “Under Control” while dressed in custom tennis gear felt like a uniquely New York moment. I realized then that any lingering disappointment came only from expecting the experience to match the way Shore made me feel – expansive, genuine, alive – when, this was a concert in a tennis stadium, on a beautiful Saturday in August, to be enjoyed and appreciated exactly as it was.

Listening to:

Shore, duh, which I cannot believe I do not own on vinyl... But also this:

Reading:

“How to Cheer For America” by Clint Smith for The Atlantic, which is the first issue of The Great Game, a newsletter that will be following the World Cup 2022 and discussing the culture and meaning of the world’s favorite sport. A sports newsletter I am excited to follow about a tournament I CANNOT WAIT TO BEGIN!

Music libraries are not immune to the entropic nature of the universe, the unlimited, ever growing nature of that library aiding its own chaos. I'm also not a power user of the Spotify platform (or any platform, honestly), which means I don't seek other ways to navigate or organize my experience outside of what I'm already used to, i.e. hitting the heart icon when a cool song comes on, or occasionally saving someone else's playlists to my library. The day my younger sister showed me how to make playlist folders in the desktop app, my mind was blown, although I was never compelled to make more than a handful. Born in 1994, my sister skews toward the last of the millennials, and despite us being born in the same defined generation, her usage of certain products and platforms are blatantly superior to my own.

I consider my interaction with Spotify to be a side effect of having lived through the heyday of peer-to-peer. I have a tendency to latch on to albums and listen to them all the way through, a habit that was no doubt formed in adolescence, at a time when downloading, organizing, and fawning over entire discographies was a part of shaping your identity. I rely heavily on my 'recent search' list to remind me of recommendations from outside sources, i.e. word-of-mouth, music blogs, algorithms beyond Spotify’s. I use ‘Liked Songs’ as a running list of songs, albums, and artists to follow up on.

In the early 2000s when downloading music was novel, the experience of listening was layered with symbols that influenced the context of how you remembered the music — how you acquired the media, if the song names were correct, if the album art was accurate. Meaning was cultivated partly through the effort of organizing, by tending to our own musical gardens. Weirdly, in scrolling through my Liked Songs list, I feel a similar way. The inability to sort forces wildly different artists next to each other (Turnstile and the New York Philharmonic, Kiefer and Sturgill Simpson), which has a way of jogging the memory. I am reminded of when I was sad based on a string of liked songs in a row, just like when I was on a salsa kick last year, and a proceeding disco kick after that. The symbols of this mode of listening are enhanced by being chronological. For me, this turns out to be a significant emotional marker.

But despite the perceived nostalgia, Spotify the platform, and streaming in general, has effected the habits of my consumption. In 2015, I saved alt-J's An Awesome Wave, making it the first full album on my Liked Songs list. In scrolling forward to the present day, the songs saved are almost entirely complete albums until 2018, when an Alvvays song "Dreams Tonite" appears between the beginning and end of two other albums. I know the song was found on a Spotify-made playlist, I remember skipping backward so I could save it, I remember the blue, orange and red of the album cover catching my eye. The Alvvays song marks the moment when I started saving more individual songs out of the context of their albums. In this realization I am not alone, as noted in a recent Guardian article:

Conversations around how digital marketplaces shape listening have long focused on the unbundling of the album. For some, though, this has felt distinctly tied to streaming. Nick Krawczeniuk, a music fan and network engineer who recently moved away from streaming, felt his listening habits were being particular affected by Spotify’s “liked songs” playlist: “I found myself selecting more and more just one-off songs from an artist, whereas before I’d been inclined to save a whole album.”

Like the result of technology, there is no reverting backward with music streaming, and the decision to change listening habits or platforms residues only with the individual user (I have personally been trying to figure out if I’m willing to take the leap for about a year.) Maybe my sis is onto something with her playlist folders. By creating a method of organization, she defines some meaning in an increasingly passive listening space, a task that doesn't get any more 'sign of the times.'

— caro.

Listening to:

The album that got me scrolling through Liked Songs in the first place. A word-of-mouth rec, btw:

Reading:

This Is What It Sounds Like, still, and this T. C Boyle fiction piece in The New Yorker in print, on the subway. Who am I?

Freelancing is complicated in this way. The freedom to choose your own work schedule is probably the most lauded aspect of a freelance career, but untethered flexibility is a misconception. At some point, we are forced to answer to someone, to comply with the normal coming-and-going of the industry. Ask a landscaper, a personal trainer, a wedding photographer. Ask a tax preparer if they would recommend taking off in the month of March.  A factor of what is required of work is the thing that makes it necessary - that a task be completed at the right place, at the right time.

Here in New York, if you work in television, fall is that time. The historical contexts of why this happens is tied (of course) to advertising, influenced primarily by (of course, again) the release of new car models. The manmade television season follows the season directed to us by the natural world, a waning summer sets up a rush of broadcast production events: show premieres, festivals, award shows, televised concerts. Despite the model being disrupted by any-time streaming endlessly suggesting the "death of broadcast TV," the phone keeps ringing, the calendar keeps filling, time rolls on.

Autumn is bittersweet. Think back-to-school, think cooler temps and darker days. Think apple cider donuts and Halloween. My affinity toward fall is marked also by the sadness of unfulfilled expectations, a feeling of missing out. Perhaps this is the come down of summer, the price we pay in return for time spent in the sun. Maybe my sobering only feels stark because of its proximity to work that cannot be easily turned away. In those moments, I relish in knowing that regardless, the feeling is not permanent. The seasons will change, regardless.

— caro.

Listening to:

Obligatory:

also, it’s AFI season. Go see them next week:

Reading:

I started Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas’ This Is What It Sounds Like before seeing Susan’s keynote at the AES convention, and all the music/audio/academia feels have me reminiscing college (I told you, bittersweet.) Also, articles on this topic: Musicians like me can no longer afford to tour, which is destined to become an essay of its own. Big topic!