All of Miles’s wives were artists themselves, I imagined they were forming some kind of commune or harem together, a deliberate relay, only subconsciously aware that they were bound together by suffering in near silence, and that their collective distress was what thrilled me as I mistook it for a better secret, a less bitter secret, one about the bliss of private union, black love, fancy dresses with no wrinkles dream about grooving in them, delicate irreverence, Jimmy Baldwin in St. Paul de Vence with Miles, their nearly interlaced hands, their bashful erotics. I wonder if they shared romantic interludes, if Jimmy wanted to be his wife too, they’d be so nice to come home to. Jimmy too seemed bent on a domestic role that could compete with the gravity of his public duties, or absove him of them, a half calm, half histrionic affair in which to steal refuge. By the time I grew out of that recurring Miles-driven reverie and saw it for the scapegoat it was, I was dangling between its teeth, a bounty the canine brings home from an illicit jaunt through the neighborhood, rescue and rescuer and missing that familiar mask of the adulterated damsel in love as in flight. I had outgrown it after attempts to abide, to overwrite my own script with nostalgia for the dystopian 1960s I’d never been to except through the music, but I would not be afforded the luxury of an un-lived life in which centering a famous man made me the annex of his legacy and soothed my own wayward and brooding ego. I tried and kept exceeding them and deleting their misshapen passages in my story until they became the blasphemous headlines in old mildewed tabloids or unsent telegrams that had once seemed urgent now languishing in a heap of dead letters. As if nature itself has a quota for how many women can betray themselves in a tradition before the spell shatters into mandated self-possession, a weapon against misery, a state of emergency, a woman who could have been a man’s best accessory and chose rewilding. That ledge, the gusts of flabbergasted wind that almost tip you into the sea there, that Ayler turned Alice Coltrane turn unnamed story.

Now that Miles is one hundred, I’m contemplating how intensely I’ve idealized him through the years, with no remorse, and no real pleasure. That was several girls ago, several versions of myself prior to this one. Now I valorize the ones who escaped him with their whole names intact, who loved him and left him, who only looked back to make sure he was gone so they could listen to his music in peace. So much of this universally idealized and criticized man’s output was tied up in the feminine, teasing or seducing it, embodying it, whispering its brisk rages as his own, loving other men and making them a family called a band, several concentric matriarchal societies which he nurtures even still. I wanted in because I wanted the story firsthand, a deceptive mix of affinity and the investigative impulse, of wanting to see the whole soul without being its sacrifice at the altar, the energy it harnesses to get over. Now, I’m his friend, his scribe, his almost untragic hero, the remnants of a feminine archetype he trampled and tried to love surviving him with an open broken heart. He deserves to be celebrated because he is Eros, a rogue demigod— androgynous, polygamous, we all belong to him the moment we hear Kind of Blue, and bend over, keel, never stand the same way again. Could you imagine being so haunted by beauty and an ancient to the future originality as he is there, that you have to draw its blood, gash it, gut it, and when you do, it comes out even more beautiful, refuses to betray you. His wives, that music, sobbing to swing for you, so you find your way home.

At lunch this week with Georgia Anne Muldrow, I jokingly said, I think Miles could still get it if he was alive. She understands me too well, knows I’m protected from myself even by some larger merger with truth— no he couldn’t, no he couldn’t, no he couldn’t, she warned, adamantly, and she was right. That enforced fragility I thought would never abandon me for true self-actualization is gone. I couldn’t give myself away to a genius with an evil streak in a fit of personal escapism; I don’t even believe in genius anymore. I think it’s all just obsession made tender and coherent for years and years that lets us be mistaken for messengers when we’re just willing to speak and be heard, having opened a channel or valve that never closes. And my obsessions are with something else now, how to love without being possessed, or why I’m possessed by this love of language and music that gets in the way of my basic bitch agendas. In the words of Marshawn Lynch, who also could get it yet can’t, I’m thankful, having recovered from that subtle and surreal trauma of being a woman who loves jazz and related sacred black technologies and has to find her way in without selling herself out.

—

I’ll write more on Miles at 100 in a longer form, and on his wives, who have names and forms, in the coming months. That Sonny Rollins died on the eve of this date feels like the actual relay between elegy and immortality, loss and resilience, that black music, like true love, trains us for. My forthcoming memoir is called Love is War for Miles for unsentimental reasons. As Fred reminded me on the phone last night, love is not a feeling, love is a practice, you show up to it. As if the war is over. Hello, forever.

Imagine yourself an involuntary customer at a brothel you thought was a record store. You’re not there to buy sex or affection, you’re there to purchase albums. Your favorite singer is twelve, possesses the euphoric despondency of a fallen angel on a mission to rescue a fallen planet, offers a repertoire of semi-seductive fairy tale love ballads, and despite rumors that he’s been beaten and groomed into his leading role in the American myth, there are no visible scars. You can put his boyhood out of your mind and sing along to the lyrics that disfigure it into your adolescence, then obsolescence. You let him displace you, speak for you, mute himself to represent his variegated audience made of children and those who love children or love to hear children sing to them in a grand and persistent reversal of developmental laws; they soothe you and not the other way around. Then those children skip several generations and enter legends, become heartthrobs, villains, Michael Jackson. We’ve reached the year 2026. The young patrons of the brothel that merchandizes their would-be peers, kids of all ages, are in their homes, on playgrounds, in their parents’ cars, having a casual breakfast, and sobbing over the death of Michael Jackson, who will have been dead in the flesh for seventeen years this June. They discovered the so-called King of Pop and began mourning him within the same week. And those who were simply reminded who he was by the renewed hysteria, who are adults now and grew up on his music, are sobbing in their cars too, explaining how much they miss him, how he deserves justice, how this grief is a piece of his justice, a petty morsel, which, as it accrues, becomes a proper call to retribution. There are thousands of videos circulating on the internet featuring civilian fans of Michael Jackson born both before and after he died, weeping for him, pitiful and listless with the need to see him alive again. What do they miss? Bidding on him in the glorified brothel? The fix of vicarious alienation? The beauty of him under electric light?

The current Michael Jackson renaissance is feeding the world’s grief addiction. And it needs supply; the addicts would be sad about their own circumstances if they didn’t have an idol with perfect pitch to lament in a loop like this, every few years, the renewed dismay over a glitching crucifixion, the refreshed escapism ennobled by sorrow. This is what’s sold of the child star at the brothel when his innocence is no longer believable, his absence, his endless death march merch. The void he’s left turns a steady profit, we testify into it, admit we failed him and adore him, and that we’re like him in that we wanted to be the golden child and were naive enough to think that golden armor exempt from evil, that we too are sinners confronting impossibility of innocence. We confess that we’re running out of people who are brave enough to play God and the devil simultaneously, to turn androgyny into a moral code and exploit it to transcend the laws of human sociality. In cinematic depictions, you rarely see the jazzmen in the famous whore houses of the war years go upstairs with a client, but by the time the record store was more a burlesque than a juke joint, that became the fantasy, that the prodigy you’re hearing sing could love you back and remain unadulterated in the act, keep playing you lullabies while you violate him and cry about it and groom the new kids in the tradition, or to follow him from glory to tragedy and back and hack at that shambles shamelessly, learning all its lyrics and dances. They have no choice, they’re in a trance.

—

Brooke Shields, a good friend of Michael’s offstage, played a twelve year old girl whose virginity was sold at an infamous Storyville bordello, in the 1978 Louis Malle film Pretty Baby. Shields was twelve or thirteen while filming, sometimes in the nude, sometimes kissing or being groped by grown men, always their muse. When she is banished to a stable childhood at the end of the film, it’s just another in the series of abductions that marks and mars her. She is neither a whore nor a child, and there is no lucid bridge between the two roles, both which she plays impeccably until you get the sense that normal life could present the most insurmountable horror of them all after her tenure amongst heathens. She grieves what ruins her. We grieve what we ruin. That a child’s first record deal and a child’s virginity for sale have more in common than most transactions, is a truism too ugly to admit, so we say one’s a movie, fiction, and the other is show business, ethical distribution of fantasies brokered by the most talented kid in the world. Cry baby, don’t ruin the dream, don’t threaten the tradition, just raise your price.

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Attached are two articles. One by James Baldwin on the Atlanta Child Murders, scanned from the original issue of Playboy in which it was published, and another on James Baldwin, a very unique profile, scanned from the original edition of Esquire in which it was published. As a survivor of his own version of child stardom, he is the most useful interjection in that closed system of black magic.

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In this final phase of Drake’s unraveling, the one where he turns generous and demonstrates his facsimile of the descent from idol to disgrace, the path from shame to mania and back as it weaves through the mainstream to become predatory self-parody we can sing along to or reject at will, enable or dismantle at will, the only responsible recourse is to walk through the flimsy wall between his ego and his reputation laughing, to show him the way through, to ignore the tantrum and complete the exorcism ourselves. Pettiness to the extent he takes it is a kind of death wish. He’s reborn in Ice and melts with it. The new albums, all three of them, have the combined texture of a desperate letter campaign to get an ex you know you took for granted back, to see yourself through the shining eyes they saw you through before you removed your mask. She might return briefly, just to make sure you haven’t evolved, just to double check on her favorite two-way imposter, but there is no love left between the trickster and his spurned tricks.

The albums carry the naive ambiance of men who believe they can run the same game forever, exploit ambivalence indefinitely. It’s nauseating, disappointing, (even though you expect it), and ultimately unlistenable. Its only hope now is a lie, Sun Ra’s equation. Its only hope now is that in not being able to listen, or to assimilate so much terrible sound if you do listen, that you’ll fill in the blanks with nostalgia and fall for the memory, what Drake used to represent, endless summer, a roster full of eligible lovers and friends, tragic mulatto president presiding over tragic mulatto rapper-in-residence, lust masquerading and romance, woke philanthropy gift appreciation years and years to aestheticize the so-called radical tradition into oblivion. The Drake industrial complex was crucial to that era’s critical condition soundtrack and provided that feeling of being on cruise control of which we all had glimmers in the years before the empire really hit its no mercy flop era, even culturally. Culture was the last bastion to dissolve into utter decadence and incoherence, finally a legacy of abbreviations imitating complete artifacts, the new face of death.

I won’t review the music on albums that aren’t motivated by the desire to make music, that are more eager to make scenes than urgent sounds. Drake made the scene he schemed to make: soft, mediocre horror at a glance, and if you look closer, one that does conjure a little beauty in its echo of what is vanishing, its pathological commitment to exposing decay, its insistence on tragedy and farce simultaneously. The famous tragic mulatto’s most famous mistake is taking himself too seriously in the eyes of two factions that want nothing to do with him when the tribes come back and their ruins really demand cataloging. The power we retain is the power to laugh at everything and ourselves in equal measure, and to know and be encoded with the reasons we are laughing to keep from crying to keep from over-performing and internalizing other people’s grievances, refusing to take even our own side. A giggle, a cackle approaching a scream.

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As far as an incomplete list goes, there was Marvin Gaye (1984), James Cleveland (1991), Ray Charles (2004), Luther Vandross (2005), Michael Jackson (2009), Etta James (2012), Whitney Houston (2012), Aretha Franklin (2019), Nipsey Hussle (2019), Roberta Flack (2025), D’Angelo (2025), Jesse Jackson (2026).

On Friday I saw Lakecia Benjamin and Isaiah Collier perform at the first ever Santa Monica Jazz Festival. The invite came as one of those casual surprises in the font and fount of early spring, on Thursday afternoon from a friend visiting from Brooklyn, and it was the first I’d heard of the occasion. Los Angeles is stubbornly dysfunctional that way, gatekeeping itself from itself all the time until some divine intervention blows the whistle dangling between sprawl and cohesion, a Hollywood approach to dysfunction, half non-disclosure, half-quiet-on-the -set, all somewhere between elitism and an underdog complex disguised as exclusivity or secretiveness running a muck in in the commons. And there are the real imposters of industry who amass power by remaining undetected and following orders and protocols, minions with official titles who know not to tell on themselves by being too vocal about their involvement in the behind-the-scenes of the city’s culture, they know when to defer to artists and optics, when to appoint proxies, how to be wizards of Oz. New events occur like pilots for new shows hoping to be syndicated, and if they fail, hoping to be forgotten so the actors can land new roles, and so it goes.

Stanley Ckarke was directing the festival, with the help of all sorts of municipal organizations, local venues, and whisper campaigns. Both saxophonist’s sets paid tribute to John Coltrane, and Lakecia’s alto opening for Isaiah’s tenor made confrontational copper coils like antennae around the well-mannered bourgeois audience, forcing that pulse toward new paces, twin-divergent-spirits as if early and late ‘Trane could align and unravel again at will, as if bourgeois bohemianism could be cured by a nest of mirror notes refusing to show you mercy or malice. She played “My Favorite Things” and “Alabama,” he played “Naima” and movements two through four of “A Love Supreme.” She was rowdy and wore loud silver metallics which hugged her athletic frame impressively, he wore a kaftan blouse and loose-fitting slacks and didn’t speak until the final movement when he announced his bandmates very quietly. He was praying and she was praising, he was spectral asceticism to her rigorous extravagance.

Isaiah’s stamina and range on his horn terrified me, a shock to the system certain not that jazz was dead, but that it was being cannibalized-alive by the cult of the derivative in a silent politics of respectability. That there’s a twenty-eight year old man from Chicago who has inherited the future of wind so matter-of-factly he plays like the dead he honors coming out of hiding one hundred years from tomorrow, like he could remix Nina Simone’s “Today is a Killer,” with Ye’s “I Thought About Killing You” and make them both sound like distressed negro spirituals for the twenty-first century, is the end of bemoaning a prevailing redundancy and the beginning a new vista for new lives in sound, our second chance at an optimism so valid it devastates the ops. Isaiah plays like nodding off into the blunt mania of coming through slaughter, like he’s drenched in blood and lullabies, a ghost-seraphin-monster, human, all too human. On the hour-long drive from my neighborhood to Santa Monica, I talked to Georgia Anne Muldrow on the phone; we discussed our plans to survive America in tact and with festivals and amphitheaters of our own. We discussed the spiritual connotation of D’Angelo’s “Chicken Grease” and psalms 19 and 109 as a pendulum’s dream swing between humility, awe, and vengeance where we can really embody the feeling of “Pursuance” Coltrane invented and Isaiah turned into Ogun’s confetti of knives and rose petals. Ogun is everywhere, Robin Kelley needed Ogun’s blessing to write about Monk, Lonnie Holley makes his offerings to Ogun, in my weekly Dunham class we make dances to please Ogun’s spirit, which is not a petulant one, it just wants us sharp and intentional. Los Angeles could use an altar to this spirit, its metals grow into figments of themselves on the boardwalk some evenings, camera shy. On the hour-long drive home I decided to form a collective, to exalt the faceless and nameless redeemer-elect who gate keeps his emissaries until we’re ready— we need more time than a festival allows and every concert is a broken capillary between modesty and excess where every walk is a parade. I decided to join the procession and the process and see if we can’t refine and redefine both that way. I alerted Georgia, Coltrane, Baraka, Ra, Katherine Dunham, and Ogun.

In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun

In the afterglow of the new jazz circuitry-mandate-coalition, another sudden invite, another float auditioning for carnival, this time to see Dave Chappelle at the Hollywood Palladium and a private afterparty jam session that would include a D’Angelo tribute. I was invited into the sun’s tent and why shield the sun in a leering gauze that might incite bandits and dark entities, I would have to see. Was this the meaning and thrill of going undercover or how we got over ourselves together in the fragile shelter of one another’s laughter. We were meeting at a restaurant first, but the restaurant caught on fire, good omen. The text read, the restaurant is on fire. I felt the spirit of Camus’ stranger enter and thought about Keith LaMar, a poet friend on death row who teaches a class on Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus in brief breaks from solitary, while awaiting retrial. Maman est morte, the restaurant is on fire, climb the slope, go back down, repeat, don’t let the sun catch you crying. Meeting on Hollywood Blvd. ensconced by a nest of glowing trucks and smoke and everyone was calm and the crisis element of the crisis vague or minor iron lung glamor, glimmers of movie scene consciousness glancing at real life.

A cat was being rescued from a tree when I came on screen. We walked the few blocks to the Palladium and into the VIP line where the first person I recognized was that light-skinned TMZ reporter with the braids whose pursed lips we all might remember from the slavery is a choice era forward, when he became some version of a made man in the digital age’s paparazzi mafia. He was there with a date, a white woman or passing, we made eye contact as I tried to place his face and I think he felt famous for a reason much more dignified than his for a split second so I had to avert attention from his gaze for the rest of the evening to make my disdain for his legacy clear. Celebrity like his is a choice. After receiving our tickets and wristbands, our phones were locked ahead of the entrance. It was a little like being taken into custody of the artifice. Netflix was filming for Dave’s next special. Cameras grazed the crowd on massive cranes, opening acts failed to rouse besides veteran comedian Earthquake whose irreverence and Louis Armstrong timbre combined as trueblood’s blues drove the blues away. I contemplated whether or not the great standup comedians aren’t a version of blues singers, musicians whose notes are the ripples of your laughter. It’s the way they can use cruelty to disarm you and then jab with tenderness or truth so precise it feels violent and curative, like remission from the ache they caused just moments before. If they fail at that maneuver, the joke doesn’t land and it feels like being a voyeur in someone’s failed therapy session. Earthquake expounded on domestic life as a newly-remarried man with the kind of vulgarity of the everyday that only arrives by way of love and a fulfilling private life. When he took the description of mechanical sex with his wife too far and the set ended, it was like a hard-time killing floor blues. You didn’t want to blame or cancel him while he was telling the honest truth, you didn’t even blame the truth itself, it was a confession, you hoped he was exaggerating but upon checking, the song is based on an inevitably, the crime syndicate in the human spirit, and it was the tragi-comedic disguised as unapologetic chauvinism.

—

Dave is a delicate flower in comparison, chain smoking on stage and wistful for forgiveness or better masochism, he discussed diplomacy, making up with Ye, breaking up with an agent, fleeing to China, his struggles with big media, James Baldwin’s choosing blackness over queerness in his oppression hierarchy and why can’t we, he pleaded. The pleas fell on half-deaf, half indifferent ears. He opened with mention of Richard Pryor bombing a set at the Palladium and how the room has weird mojo. I thought of Pryor on fire and the conversation I’d had earlier that day with Saul Williams, about how Dave might need a friend like Maya Angelou who wrote Richard Pryor a letter from Ghana stating he needed to come visit and feel the feeling of all black people, no niggas, in a place. She wanted her friend to stop using the word nigga in sets, in general. He did visit, he did stop, he did set himself on fire, I think in that order. Maya est morte aussi and if Dave has a friend like that, it’s Saul, who will not police his exact diction but perhaps suggest what attitudes to adjust in his killing floor blues so he doesn’t set himself on fire in the wrong sense—immolation instead of a glowing immortal aura of the brutally honest witness whose blues is your laughing with him to keep from crying.

Dave called California faggotland and said he’d chose to fight on its side over the confederacy in the impending civil war his white-passing grandfather told him was coming. The same grandfather who later and drunker at the afterparty, he told us had gone on dates with Roberta Flack. When Dave met Flack, she was in a wheel chair, squeezed his hands, and said a DC nigga does what DC nigga has to do. Dave’s humor is a loom he weaves across sinuous hours of music and ecstatic disillusionment, it builds up in your system like a medicine or like a poison depending, and it tends toward song, it pursues the speechlessness that demands song. Lauryn Hill came out at the end of the set, performed sped up versions of Miseduction classics and ended with a duet with Dave on “Killing Me Softly” which he prefaced by announcing, you’re lucky you’re not the bitch ass niggas who left, you get to hear me sing. A triumphant off-key bluesing of the killing he made performing, a completist’s finale. If you knew how hard it was to be what we are you would respect us more, he added before dropping the mic.

When we walked into the afterparty at a lounge a few blocks away, Mos Def who I know we’re meant to call Yasiin now, was dancing alone, spinning like a Dervish, like Monk, to set it off, and we joined him, made an impromptu ballet on the set of a pseudo negro Twin Peaks, is how the room looked, all red, all blood memories. Him, Common, Talib, and Busta Rhyms took to the stage to perform some of their classics and freestyle, remember cyphers? But the most memorable was Yasiin’s rendition of his unreleased “Tournament,” wherein he repeats the refrain total control with hymnal hope in his cadence, as if to beg, please grant me this access to an at-will sovereignty and I’ll use it to unwind the curses Ogun places on the city of angels when we refuse to integrate his element into the starship, you are my starship. Dave followed the emcees with a gospel, proclaiming so much gratefulness and explaining that one of the last things D’Angelo said to him was that he had taken himself too seriously while in his prime, warning Dave to not repeat his grave mistake. So now he sings, now he sobs. Never would have made it, Dave began in earnest, and he sang the whole first verse before Jennifer Hudson joined him on stage and they duetted on the song while the room stood still on the axis of Yasiin’s spin. I’m stronger, I’m wiser, much better, so much better. It was so beautiful, so penitent, so Hollywood pentecostal.

The music went on for four hours and closed with Dave, and Sza, whose parents were attendance, singing “Killing me Softly” in encore, followed by D’Angelo’s “How Does it Feel.” Dave stepped off stage and gave me and a few others a hug before his wife ushered him away. There were so called celebrities everywhere in the room, too many and too human to name drop without being like TMZ, and the crowning achievement was that with our phones locked away, no one cared who had a fancier reputation, it became about the music alone, a modern Minton’s, Robert Glasper backing intermittently, it was as if we had a culture again and not just a parade of grand performances that stream for views. This might be the best night of my life, Dave shouted into the mic between a gospel and a Killer Mike cameo. And I’m not a celebrity, I’m a conspiracy, he assured finally, before retreating into have it your way, anything you want, you can decide. “How Does it Feel” is a gospel disguised in erotics and arousal, and Dave Chappelle believes in God with a sinner’s hedonistic devotion. You guys are the luckiest people in the word, God said you could be here tonight, and I did. The God complex as a system of faith in a power stronger than and emanating from the self is the blues man’s way of forming a collective on an alienated, solitary road full of mines and corpses. They’re killing all his friends, or canceling them. Why wouldn’t he be a blues singer masquerading as a comedian and upsetter, a trickster mediating between his victims and his sympathizers with a pitched down version of “I Cried for You,” now its your turn to cry over me, but he looks up and everyone’s pointing and laughing. And Yasiin sounded like MF DOOM, also dead, also a member of their generation and collective, and Dave sounded like Robert Johnson with a restored sense of proportion, trying to break his deal with the devil once and for all.

When your whole life pivots to video and virality, sales, tours, and distribution deals, your every deed activating the shrill ding of an ever-present etheric cash register as long as you show up and play yourself, you might begin to rely on secrets and perversions just to retain something personal, some illusory quotient of privacy or sovereignty, some quiet. You might invent a second skin, one which houses the inner-criminal, a tantruming rebel fame-baby deviant you have to raise well so he doesn’t resort to vapid acts of rebellion for thrills; he wants to ruin your chances of always being famous, he misses the benevolent dark of unknowns, the sanctimony of the plebeian, save him from the philistine’s dream. But it was too late for the streamer, and for Celeste, his fourteen year old girlfriend who was found dead in his impounded Tesla in September of 2025. She had been missing for a year. When her chainsawed remains were found in D4vd’s abandoned vehicle, he’d just set out on a world tour for his debut album Withered. One of the most popular singles on the album is called “Romantic Homicide.” In the video he wears a blindfold of white gauze and holds a bloody knife like one might grip a trophy; he’s in the aftermath of a murder, a woman’s limp body on a bed, and he’s singing in the familiar lopsided cursive of heartfelt grifter musicians I killed you, and I didn’t even regret it. Even the way he spells his stage name appears death-obsessed in retrospect. It’s believed that he first met Celeste in an online Fortnite match when she was eleven, and that the murder was a premeditated attempt to prevent accusations of statutory rape that might come with any retroactive publicity of their relationship’s timeline. The stakes had been raised in between Fortnite and his breakthrough into the pseudo-mainstream, and I can imagine a world in which he had accomplices and encouragement to discard anyone who might jeopardize his ascent, by any means necessary. His was a dingy, grimy, twenty-first century come-up, virtual and contrived.

What was realest about D4vd while on the rise, was the blunt almost supplicating fetishization of evil in his music that suggests he was getting it how he lived. There is no protecting the Celestes of this era from their Davids or the D4vd’s from their Goliath without a mass shaming of the grift economy and a re-tuning of the collective ear to something decent and substantial, something beyond the binary that lets the maladaptive daydreams of the popular loner become a currency for auto-erotic internet playdates that make them rich, famous, but no less maladjusted, no better equipped to be loved and love in return, the edict in the jazz standard “Nature Boy,” inverted and maimed by our cyborg age. We would have to stand up and walk out on the simulation in unison. D4vd told one interviewer that he knew his songs were primed to go viral when his mother complained that they were too violent. Bloodthirstiness is never not good for business.

In the interval between Thriller (1982) and “Romantic Homocide” (2022), what’s changed is that the singer whose song openly fantasizes about the erotics of violating a love interest can’t quite sing anymore, is a more talented criminal than musician, or his sonic fantasies are just confessions, testimony, or we’re in a time loop rigged by the convoluted cult of Michael Jackson, the only one who will always be famous. I digress to mimic the year-long digression that occurred after Celeste was found dead, or because introducing a scandal to itself in delay is like patting the devil on the head. Now your hands are bleeding too, you knew something was off before and muted that uneasiness, a coward’s decorum. You will always be famesick. I’m sure some enterprising director or AI-obsessed grifter will team up with Netflix and acquire the rights to a film about David and Celeste. Someone will play his clairsentient mother, maybe a younger Alexa Demie would be Celeste, and it will be somebody’s breakthrough role, and someone will make some money telling the story they ignored while it was unfolding on the scroll in front of them, in fine print, in between tour dates, everyday, everywhere and nowhere and always.

Limp narcotic outrage against the machines to which we’ve pledged our days is being drained from the collective like a biofilm lately, and we were never that mad except reflexively at the stagnancy of contentment, the trappings of hyper-convenience and constant access to the simulacra of the dead and the living alike. Using the barren militancy the simulation demands we made our meek adjustments. The people are tired of pretending to want to save one another when it’s more tempting to pet Baphomet’s infamous head and feign delirium if anyone ever catches you loving your enemy later. Prepare the non-disclosure agreement, the Radiohead video eraser clause I’m not here, this isn’t happening. While mulling all of this, a casual dramatist like Cassavetes driving the cliffs of Mulholland and berating the ancient future with such exuberance he ennobles it, I came home from seeing the new Michael Jackson biopic and listened to North West’s new EP, like I was still on the clock. Were it not for her parents’ infamy, North would be choosing between embodying David or Celeste in her own vainglorious and precocious ego, in the spotlight too early, too late, inevitably, she will always be famous, she will have to pick a side and hope it wants her back. What’s not clocking? This child star farm we call America is running out of new kids, is not safe for kids. I keep reminding my friends we’re the new adults, but I’m lying—we’re the kids too, unsafe too— running, auditioning, hoping to be spared, to be released from the gaze of time, to be discovered (hear rescued) while alive.

He left everything on the stage. — Attendee of his final tour date in Atlanta

If you can’t be free, be a prodigy — Margo Jefferson

Unspoken pain was his contraband, a dignity contrived from shame. And he wouldn’t have been a poet, rockstar, demigod, and rebuker and inciter of idolaters if he hadn’t been so skilled at inverting that folksy, self-deprecating torment he carried as aura and echo, into decadence and shambles. He mastered the act of decaying to ripen like low-sloping fruit or a tone plucked from its source too early so that when we purchase it from supermarkets or major labels, what we call ripeness is fermentation, the softness of rot turned to spirits, blending blood into a lilac wine the soul is drunk on while pretending to be sober, composed, and abstaining. Belligerent Prince Rogers Nelson stumble-spinning to the micro-tones in his cryptic falsetto, wearing his mask of ruffles and fringe, afro-midevil innocence, textures so unabashedly lush they approach minimalism through their uniformity; the coherence of exhaustion that pivots to effortlessness and momentum to hide.

It looks easy to be Prince in his final run the way it looks easy to be the most charismatic zombie who ever lived, or to watch people celebrate your slow suicide believing they’re shepherding your new era, your comeback blues. There were signs. When an interviewer asks him if he’s addicted to recording, he winces, addicted is a strong word. The masochist always hints at when his pain tolerance is depleted and turned toward bypass or downcast hedonism. He jokes that he needs recording rehab (this is in 2014, his final published interview), then he explains that he needs to tour to pay his bills, but not to record. No one asks what toll the road takes, or the stakes of needing to stay on it to stay afloat. On stage, he’s a little frailer, a little freer, replacing gaudy erotics with intimacy in a series of stripped down acapela concerts that would be his final and yet unfinished tour— a piano and a microphone— as close as he could come to composing his own requiem.

Alone, seated in front a of a grand that dwarfs him and backed by a massive projector casting the psychedelic paislies of early PC screen savers, Prince serenaded himself to a long sleep, calling the illness that forced him to reschedule two Atlanta shows a “flu” when he returned to make good on the performances, apologizing and snaking his forearm a little awkwardly in a mimed gestural accompaniment to the disclaimer “I was a little under the weather” before erupting into his solo version of purple rain. Ultraviolet, the highest frequency before the invisible, was what he leveraged there. He wanted to haunt without disappearing from public life, a dangerous flirtation with omnipotence and self-mastery so complete it negates the need for a living self as the spirit exceeds the flesh or surmounts it in real time, paradoxically, as a device within the live performance. And he attained that degree of creative sovereignty somewhere between Atlanta and eternity, was unresponsive for a time on the flight back to Minneapolis, which had to make an emergency stop in a small town in my natal state of Iowa. He was revived and then discharged because the hospital had no private room, a diva’s demand he wouldn’t compromise. He threw a party at his mansion on April 20th, 2016, and he was found dead in an elevator on the premises the next morning. You could feel earth’s reserve of ultraviolet being siphoned by the demons of true crime that day, of truces with traitors. There was an offness, a faint injustice in the atmosphere, that of an event too sudden to seem real when it was announced. Suspicions were quelled by more disclaimers, heaved by then like feeble laments. Too many leaps from stages in platform boots, an ache in the hip unresolved by surgery, dulled or numbed by opiates, extended doctor’s interventions discouraged by his faith, pride or superstition, and his overriding poise and self-possession which sometimes manifested as secretiveness, privacy that left clues but never allowed its practitioner to seek help directly. You will have seen Prince insolent, even mischievous, but not unkempt, never in disarray, not loud unless singing, never begging even in his moments of protest and refusal, never decrying pain in public; the gravel in his voice always grinned at us. He even seemed amused or merely inconvenienced by those who dared to violate him, as if to suggest they were just immature souls yearning for their karma and in need of his attention to invoke it. He had a zen intensity bracing him, that of a guru slowly backing away from his congregation as the mantras faded out, murmuring, stand in the way of love and we will smoke them all, even his threats benevolent and valid. He possessed that level of integrity that is itself a kind of possession, a gauntlet he would finally genuflect in front of between dimensions.

It felt like he’d vanished, like he was taken or martyred in the night in exchange for an enduring myth of the unwavering prodigal orphan son, another half-christ embodying and dying for our sins, our worship of him as of a version of golden calf, the purple calf, the purple cast of bruises blurring the line between his bone and his nerve, all the nerve he had to keep standing on the sanded resin of himself, boosted by esters and oxy-etc. A doomed performance of recovery, subconsciously self-destructive generosity, a little inevitable folding into the space between selves. And in the wake, a shattering vault full of trapdoors and clues we may never access, questions many refuse to ask, a baton trapped in a broken elevator falling through the shaft with contracts and last dates. A solo album commemorating the final tour recorded almost thirty years prior. An undead crooner who will haunt us forever. Prince is why, ten years later, there’s an inexplicable nostalgia for 2016, the year he died, completing the uncanny exodus of a cast of musicians who are now ripe again for the kind of hagiography that further erases them— James Brown, Michael, Whitney, Prince Rogers Nelson.

—

I was listening to Prince’s version of “Seventeen Days,” from the posthumously released Piano and a Microphone album he recorded in 1983, when the elevator I was in sputtered to a halt between the sixteenth and seventeenth floors of my midtown Manhattan Marriott. I was on my way to give a talk about the Black Arts Movement at Harlem Stage. My car was waiting out front, the driver called and I answered. Can you please tell the front desk I’m trapped in the elevator, I urged. He replied in chipper half-Mandarin, outside, outside. I’d been stuck for ten minutes before he’d arrived and had been at peace with the idea that the city had finally been struck by a bomb or meteor and I was alone in my platonic cave to wait out the disaster, like Prince before me, avenging him. I’d already sent telepathic goodbyes to my mother and grandmother, decided it was good fortune to get to spend the final hours alone with my thoughts, and gone elsewhere in the galaxy to reevaluate everything. No one was coming to save me and that felt like the safest notion in the world right then. Prince’s version of “A Case of You” came on and I sat down on the filthy broken-machine carpet and hummed along. The alarm turned to fainter background chatter. I waited, dissociating. After the driver left, exasperated and of no help, I thought about I am Legend; I could be Will’s character in my mind till the final scene and even then. I decided to call somebody instead of wholly surrendering. I tried Fred Moten, who lived not far from the hotel at the time, the front desk, my contact at Harlem Stage. None of them could help and my phone battery was yellow-gold about to go ultraviolet. Dramatically, I dialed 911 and was rescued by two beautiful fire fighters within twenty minutes. One, named Patrice, after Lumumba, gave me his number as I made my way out of the lobby and up to Harlem for the talk. When I arrived, the panel proceeded as if I hadn’t just entered through a quantum tunnel. Baraka, Sun Ra, Sonia, I heard myself elaborating our silly collective reentry into Harlem, vicious modernism, vicious the way it’s made.

Prince died on my birthday in 2016 and I believe he’s been haunting me, sweetly, that I’m meant to channel music with the nonviolent violet hues, the grimace and grievance of his abridged ambitions, that he wants to tell us something about where a timeline goes when it splits, how it becomes a song and bottomless interval, like the number seventeen which becomes 8 in holy math and is the serpent entering his bruised arm and dancing the weather, glad-handing the tempest or temptation that made his pain addiction a pleasure, a hunger. Why me, I asked, when esperanza said I remind her of him in tone and temperament, knowing the answer. A dignity built from transposed shame, the ease and tranquility that comes from being hard on oneself to a fault. A belief that everything is divine comedy and very serious, that restraint done correctly leads to the kind of surplus they call the garden of earthly delights and once you’re inside its gentle mazes, trapped between up and down, there and gone, you can just ride the chanting wind like a disaffected guru, thrilled to reimagine limbo as an antidote to the Devil’s Interval, as a blues orchestra you invited holding you hostage.

Whatever the paranormal kinship is between us, it enriches my self-mythologizing in that I can’t get to the bottom of it, it’s opaque but persistent, a little nagging like a sibling spirit. It is my life in elegy and reaching past it toward some ecstatic reprieve. It’s trapped in the number 8, patrolling that half-mast oblivion of twin souls who don’t want to draw too much attention to an unspeakable shared mission encoded in us as some guttural regalness that cannot be pinned down except as polyphasic, as what we go between to get over ourselves, our painless suffering in jest, relentlessly rehearsed and improvised privacy made public ego deathlessness. Margo Jefferson writes stunningly of Ike Turner as her illicit alter-ego, evil trickster loadstar redeemer: Was it the mere radiance of his soul? Not altogether. It was his contained manipulation of his materials. He set the structure, the beat, the pace. He stood impassively before voracious crowds and bent them to his will, seeming indifferent all the while, she marvels. My inner saboteur/savior with a God complex is Prince, whose diabolical side was both subtler and more dangerous, he for whom self-betrayal was so anathema he would dissolve his own form to avoid it, addicted to keeping the record which can only be lived. I’m left to answer the question: If you don’t have to perform to survive and what remains of the record threatens to cannibalize you to keep itself alive, what keeps you?

1

I’d just finished watching a black man play Poseidon of Nickerson Gardens, hurling his prop-trident into the pacific to save his son from excavating the dream too well and becoming it, and I was crying end-of-a-good movie tears for Albert Ayler, who also leapt into the sea thinking wings would spontaneously appear for him midair. In Ayler’s case, no one was there to catch him in time, no imaginary trident for a sunbeam, Jesus! Ayler, midair, play-crying. No raft, no father in prison then released to a life of rehabilitation and tending to horses, like in the movie, and it’s the year of the fire horse, and my phone lit up, caught the associative blaze, blue cast on soft tears, datapoint on flesh-salted disappointment with the end of new-beginning cinema, recalling the grubby scent of hands palming a ball that’s touched the asphalt from a scene in the film as I wipe the blurry iphone screen.

It was Sonia Sanchez calling from Philly, 3AM on the dot in Los Angeles, and surrendering to the absolute hegemony of improvisation in jazz, Amiri’s line, which echoed then like a silent siren, I answered. And she was my trident, my sudden wing, for several hours. I wonder why Birmingham keeps this vigil over me in the style of Coltrane’s “Alabama,” so subtle and direct. Sun Ra, Lonnie, Sonia, someone to watch over me, how they were appointed, in the tribe of anarchic pointillists Fred named after Cecil Taylor, how I am abiding. And we get to the part about the way the word ego and the word ghost go together real bad, are enmeshed in a joint math and bending one another’s seams to break the equation that cannot be broken. We decry the way the mundane disdains the ghetto mysticism it subsists on, we decry it in a near unison of spirit, that casual and lethal betrayal, and we’re in New Jersey with Toni Morrison, and Atlanta with James Baldwin, and Barbados with Nina Simone by telegram, and on the phone with Amiri again, then all of them die, and for a while she’d stopped taking or making calls, fearing a call or visit from death every morning. We decide that the ghost is an ego trying and failing to dissolve while trapped in matter, refusing to let the soul transition into the next realm; the hungry ghost you see in some men’s eyes and demeanors as they ask you for a loyalty and generosity they know nothing of, is a disembodied ego haunting itself to avoid its destined oblivion and if you can kill the ego while you’re alive half-witnessing that self-denial in the distorted mirror of the other, you can survive it, and live forever. We discuss veganism and the way manuka honey coats the throat of we hypocrites and misfits like a dumb medium, bee cum and wonder, an eagle in the gills an angelfish, torchbearer, hoarder of elders and the young of all ages, a melon hiding beneath a meddler tree like in the Iching, hexagram 44, line 5, wrapping and falling from heaven, henchmen of my quantum tunnel haven. It was as if I had made the call, and the call itself was just an answer that could only arrive in the crest of my corseted ego, to collaborate in the killing off of some final unnameable phantom which is now subsumed in the sweetness and drip of the honeydew beneath the immortalized meddler tree. I will protect its malfunction there. Thy will be done, etcetera. Where a bandwagon was a weapon so hideous it had to carry egos and drop them into the spirits of wingless geese & 1973. We watched the sunrise together on opposite coasts like vigilantes. Together we could host the last great afterparty before revolution, which we no longer believe in on the record kept at the surveillance photo shoot, looping the The Moments’ “Not on the Outside” till it buckles as a sundown battle cry.

Who and how we celebrate is in his image, in hijacked approximations of that now-fragmented consciousness of the One. Lately, with every myth and tradition the hegemons use to remain in power spiraling toward obsolescence, the god complexes of the self-anointed are more vivid. They’re revealing themselves as a pattern that often begins as controlled demolition of one’s social standing or reputation followed by a rehabilitation and comeback that is portrayed as divine, inevitable, unsuppressible by the low-humming fascism of the technocracy and its human and machine overseers.

It’s unclear what initiated this new wave of resurrections, but on April Fool’s Day in Los Angeles, Ye was standing atop a massive replica of earth in front of eighty thousand zealots enacting a soft coup of the industry’s blacklisting apparatus and instructing the tech crew to raise the earth up, after chastising them over a mishap with the strobe lighting. It seemed like a modern miracle of optics and optical illusions before it galvanized a trend wherein the industry tries and fails to recast drastic controversy as mere this-too-shall pass misunderstanding. Throughout the past two weeks, Usher, J. Cole, and Jay Electronica have all exposed varying degrees of sympathy for Diddy less than a year after his conviction related to sex trafficking and a couple of years after hotel surveillance footage that shows him clearly and flippantly beating longtime girlfriend Cassie was released across all media outlets, on top of the documentary that details his by-any-means necessary ascent to the status of head pawn in charge. A man who looks to be a botched clone of Jeffrey Epstein and calls himself Palm Beach Pete has embarked on a press tour to assure the world he is not Epstein. Laypeople have taken to comparing the shapes of their teeth, and it’s suspicious and also grotesque that they seem identical. Jimmy Kimmel, king of jestermaxxing as a gaslighting tool, hosted Pete as if he’s just some anodyne viral sensation with a new movie in theaters and not playfully invoking the spirit sociopath who potentially faked his death and came back to rebrand his trafficking empire as resort-core leisure (again). Jay Z is back doing interviews and announcing concerts, pretending to be some kind of spiritual leader of the coalition of black billionaires who was never friends with his criminal peers, and Trump used generative AI to depict himself as Jesus, inciting so much backlash from MAGA he practically rescinded for the first time in his long history of offending the public. And then there’s this Michael Jackson biopic, for which the trailer looks like a glorified version of a posthumous hologram tour or an extended ride at a zombie amusement park. I can’t wait to see it, to hate it how it hates us.

The art of the attempted comeback is crucial in spectacle’s last days because it reveals how low the stakes are by the time the party is ending and the lights come on at last. Anyone with moderate charisma and enough foolhardy is welcome into the ring to play final circus act or last failed gladiator/half-martyr in d-major, until the real thing comes along, because the real thing will never come along again. We need the simulations to become more obvious and uncanny so we know it’s over and dance on its grave right. These almost-real versions of formerly revered men return, gutted and glazed, to announce or complete their deaths, to writhe and rewrite themselves as fallen angels rather than failed agents of totalizing chaos. They hope we finish consuming them down to the bone and set them free. They end up exposing the limits of Christ consciousness and its unlimited jurisdiction over culture-making, how being preserved or even forgiven is not the same as being saved, how the rotting spirits of the ritually disgraced and depraved captivate as obscenity when the singing gets too shrill and even seem brave when greatness and real courage are fading and flickering on the scene. It’s been an unannounced parade of revivals whose goal is to rouse the spectator’s faith in names and forms, a false spring that finally notices the unglamorous, nauseous green it’s conjuring when it’s too late to change its tone.

Drake’s Back, A False Altar/ Not the thing itself but Ideas of the thing

Drake meanwhile, is quietly sulking and gatekeeping himself against the tide of explicit and declarative returns to the spotlight, proving the value of his unserious fake-mafioso whimsey to hip hop now that he’s quieter, and forcing the others to play jester. If we complain that rap has fallen from grace, and in falling implicated the society at large, bracing the impact of empire’s fall, we’d have to elaborate on what grace it once possessed and where its grooves were situated— how was that grace derived in the first place if not from looking away from deeds and toward words? It was a lowly, lukewarm, and rhetorical grace for certain, by the middle years. And was it situational or inherent in the form as the music pretended to make space for an upwardly mobile gimmick gangsterism to well-adjusted mogul pipeline, or a confessionalism to social justice pipeline, propaganda, as if emulating mainstream emcees would make those archetypes boundless and not the charade of false hope and false prophets it’s all become. Can poetry survive spectacles of hypocrisy, or the middle brow posing as militant, or the clownish fame it invents to protect its heart? Can it survive a conversion so unsubtle as into a hybrid of bragging and begging; has it not always been contending with this?

The genre’s gaudiest graveyard for the living is Drake’s back, not his comeback into statements and reinvention, but the black ink on his high-yellow, slightly-pink flesh, his anatomy of acrimony and worship tattooed with a series of amulets so bold and sentimental as to be a ghetto-fabulous mural on a lonely wall somewhere, a transient billboard for his performance of isolation blues. It’s like a crime scene, like he’s trying to tell us who violated him by showing us who he loves, who he carries on his back, whose image he lets stab him in the back to back him up, to be his self-appointed team of spirit vigilantes. His mother, his grandparents, Lil Wayne, Sade, Aaliyah, an uncle, his producer, his father, an owl, a dove, Harry Potter, some hieroglyphs, all unapologetically assembled and looking out like guards, ops, or hostages, faces shifting with the contours of his love handles.

It’s so tacky, such a disaster of affections and obsessions, that it’s almost beautiful, a mourner’s bench he wears as armor to the tempo of a drunken sample of Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things.” It makes me cringe, and I keep looking, tilting my head at different angles to see if the scene becomes oracular or sadder or ecstatic depending on the vantage. It’s crowded, reverent, loud, cellular memory pushed out to scream, his half-black feelings. When he turns his back, there are ten sets of eyes, making his slow walk offstage more animated than the comeback fetishes of the men who share his affliction as pawns with no further function to their kings, eager to trade their dead currency for something useful, for safety. They make little altars everywhere. The earth is burning with blasphemous near-poets hunting for new mediums with stunt fire. The thief next to Jesus believes he’s the one on the cross. Not out of delusional empathy, but because when that consciousness does come back, descending from above or beyond this tragicomedic realm, it comes back to haunt its counterfeits. It’s a sacred time for our poetry and our music, its detractors are sufficiently haunted by their own paint-by-number shadows. And no one’s coming to save it or clear them except these failed assassins, battling against themselves, so we must let them.

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I wanna dance for somebody the way I write for somebody, the me who exists beyond my own understanding, until I call her forth as a scandalous or casual confession in a grammar meant to bend the language to my will and elevate everyday speech into spell and study. Dance was my first language. Can you tell? Can’t you tell? Shhhhh, don’t tell, or pray tell, I don’t know which. It was my secret language between grief and fantasy and it taught me where each word falls in the body as a gesture or jester— stillness, twitch, rumble, purple, red, yellow-gold—each word its own soloist making alliances to gain access to speech or sound on earth, coaxing you into its frequency as position, and the body indicates which ones are most useful in the moment. Sometimes the gestures calling a word forth are so subtle, almost imperceptible, and you have to exaggerate them to even get them into physical space, or isolate and suspend them in space under the microscope of hidden but unimpeachable destiny like a close-up frame in a film hitting right as the jaw slackens to prepare an utterance left unsaid or cut. Writing is dancing the language, choreographing it, making it your marionette and divorcing it from reason when necessary, because this is our music before it’s an efficient resource for the distribution of facts and ideas, it’s a way of encoding those ideas with rhythm and tempo, of singing them so they cannot be as easily forgotten as silence is when it restricts or disregards a call into language, when we’re being too lazy or cowardly to say what we mean. That kind of silence is usually very still and stagnant, near death, it can’t dance and its joints lock into immobility and the skin around them congeals, sags, and keratinizes until would be thoughts are mummified, nullified, limp. That’s the landscaped version, the garden where my belief in the body as a part of everyday speech, grows.

—

In the mundane this looked like my mother enrolling me in dance classes in Los Angeles less than a year after my father died, and me taking to them so naturally and militantly it almost scared her. When she asked me if I wanted to keep going or quit, I would look at her in disbelief, disgusted… quit? It was like being asked if I wanted to quit talking. And for a while I had, in some manner, trauma or loss had made my throat constrict and dance classes opened it, rewired it. I could feel the knot of stone there unraveling, then demolished in real time as I learned to pirouette in satin pointe shoes we’d hammered soft on the stiff wooden parts. I loved the dainty bloodstains on the lambswool between my toes and the wood. I loved my pliable arches like the Song Dynasty loved the lotus feet that came of binding. I was nine, falling in love with my spilled blood and obedience to impossible standards before puberty even. After class one afternoon I closed the door of the huge white Chevy my mom drove until we were carjacked at gunpoint and it was stolen and I kind of thanked the heavens. Bye bye miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee but— then the record skipped. I slammed its heavy door on my pinky toe. It bled profusely, none of that dainty sacrificial lamb’s blood. I decided maybe I had developed too much affection for my own pain and was inviting disaster that way, and learned to balance ache with ecstatic, effort with ease, but not too well to stop me from exceeding myself. At that age, I couldn’t have formed that command-to-self in language and concept yet, I formed it in the body. I decided I don’t only like when difficult things look effortless, which is what dance often teaches, I need to master skills to the extent that they feel that way in the body and therefore in the mind and spirit; I need virtuosity with my entire soul, to witness it, to embody it, to inspire it. What delirium, but so what, it’s my own, it felt sovereign. I was indulgent about my love of discipline that tends toward the obsessive and that freedom on the other side of it, secret and unspeakable. As Fred Moten says, words don’t go there. Your body goes there alone to dance for somebody, the other you, the soldier you, her angel engine.

I bring this up because I’ve been dancing again, reanimating these memories of grooming and glory and I’m about to embark on the minor adventure of documenting the process of getting back into shape to perform amidst archives of my childhood dance practice. It’s part necessity for a memoir I’m writing and part necessity for my spirit, which is coaxing me toward what I need to say next on the page this way. And I keep having these flashbacks that are not quite nightmares but would be for the uninitiated. One conjures my first year of summer camp at my dance studio, when we gathered around like juveniles sent away to Outward Bound, or a scene in Dangerous Minds and watched a VHS of child dancers in communist Russia standing in an hours long line. One-by-one the girls, around my age, were made to stand on a body mass indexing machine and those without BMIs considered appropriate were sent away abruptly, dismissed and the flick of a tyrannical wrist. And they’d be sobbing, aware that if not dance they’d be made functionaries in some other joylessly rationed station of society, no pain, no glamor, a mercy some of us cannot afford. Why were they showing this to a room full of black and brown girls in Los Angeles? Because my body was more like that of the girls allowed to stay in the video, I heaved an internal sigh of relief, gasped backwards, such efficient mind control those images were, that it felt appropriate. And class began with Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” like a beat coming in after a mic drop. When I was a pre-teen, we danced to Smashing Pumpkins’ Bullet with Butterfly Wings, how my heart sings with those facile-but-perfect opening lines, the world is a vampire, set to drain. Finally, angst openly committed to itself and not hiding behind shrill cheer. How my heart sinks as the steps place it on tenuous strings till it steadies, secret desire holds you out the flames. How each count of 8 reaches with the road on our long drives to national dance competitions in Vegas, car full of costumes and you can already smell the stale ash of indoor chain smoking and the funk of casinos by Barstow; it’s a weight in the air, pathological and seductive, a feeling that comes over you when you’re en route to dance for somebody you hope loves you.

—

That the song propelling me now is by Whitney Houston, is a detail I almost forget, and then shudder over. Of course the pleading, gaudy anthem, successor to love me love me love me, say you do, needs Whitney’s frequency on it. The original recording of “Wild is the Wind” is by Johnny Mathis, but the best version is Nina Simone’s. I hear the sound of mandolins, she glories, you’re spring to me, all things to me. Only when the muse is a yet-to-be realized version of you, can you bend air like she did, as deliverance. I’ve wanted to dance to that song for ages, to flail and fold with it. Perhaps I finally will. Nina, who I once thought misguided for insistently reminding every interviewer that she was a classically trained pianist who somehow got roped into jazz singing and protest music, and that the rope was hanging and irritating her by the 70s, once the radical tradition was gutted and sold to aesthetics— but now I understand. Now she’s in me forcing me to resume my training, to confront the fear of showing effort that haunts we who go between sacred and profane, or discipline and freedom like chameleons. Nina was often indignant about it, her tone retaliatory, as if to say, I’m gonna get you back for making me some nuance of a pop star, for trying to induct me into substanceless fame. Amiri Baraka would echo that sentiment after winning an Obie Award for his play Dutchman, in 1964. If they were going to make me famous, they would have to pay for it, he warned. It’s one of my favorite statements of all time, more people should make it. But this is not about vengeance so much for me, it’s about avenging, retroactive get-back to honor my favorite souls by ensuring that I don’t repeat a cycle of exile from my innermost desires and wind up embittered by a conformity that amounts to dancing with rather than for, ceding my purpose to the chorus. It’s not that Nina or Baraka lost touch with their dharma, it’s that part of it was hijacked for the purposes of a culture that ultimately betrayed them by making them idols in a pseudo revolution. This could happen to anyone so good at being herself that her real self feels ethereal.

—

The part of me that lives to do grand-jetés across a buoyant cork floor while C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat” plays on the highest volume, the phrase everybody dance now filling the studio like a roll call, is re-awakening. That soul fragment has returned. And I’m learning that the cure for the idleness, the pure trap that is nostalgia, which locks people in idealizations and re-litigations of a deeply flawed past, in the body, in the story, and in the writing or telling and keeping of the story in time— the only antidote to getting caught in that trap for an eternity, is return to its source, where the notches in the earth that mark it, like the scars and marks on my lotused feet, can be stamped and stomped out into new territory, new gestures, new space for the word. We’ve all heard of the word. Now to become it.

I’ll be having open classes weekly at my exhibition here, and accompanying them with notes and writing, some of which I’ll share here, more of which will go in the memoir, but all of while I’ll document on video, for somebody.

Is the death of some music an immortal death?

Orpheus is condemned for looking back at his muse too soon as he rescues her from the underworld. He’s instructed by Hades and Perseophone, to wait until they reach the surface, and he fails to follow that one instruction; he peeks like a child counting half-blindfolded by his own hands during a final round of hide-and-seek. Eurydice falls back. He loses the light in his sound. Both are ruined. And music itself, once safe in the rejoicing heart of Orfeu Negro, learns to seek new refuge in tragic ballads, the glorification of loss, violence, despair, hopecore with feathers and tears that glisten ever so delicately, cultivating a taste for the maudlin and saccharine and undone. And we get the diabetic, hypertensioned sounds of today, spoils of an ancient spell gone wrong. What countermyth would reunite these semi-divine forces meant for union and flailing in estrangement, whose crisis of faith disfigures the universe itself ? What would bring the denatured music back to itself and beyond good and evil? Why do we keep looking back too soon and falsifying potential resurrections, or not looking back soon enough and raising the most corrupt of the would-be dead, and what is it about spring that makes that looking feel buoyant, valiant, and supple, the eyes light and agile as they gather such ambivalent ghosts?

There are countless jazz standards devoted to the season, but the most accurate is Sun Ra’s, an inebriated announcement of primavera, of the early bloom of the true new year. In the doomed cadence of near-dread that laughs before it settles, a chorus chants it’s spring, it’s spring, springtime again, as if reciting a death march, recruiting you to join it. You could mix it into D’Angelo’s version of Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Making Love” strolling in the park, watching winter turn to spring, to uplift it a little, but the soporific and entranced mode of the Ra has a barefoot glamor about it, that of zombies in caftans regaining souls. Don’t turn back too quickly and watch them, or spring will descend into hell, the myth whispers from offstage. Someone defiant didn’t listen this year, some Orpheus impersonator with missiles and Mossad on his back. Persephone tasted another red seed. D’Angelo and Roberta Flack both died last year. Who would remind them that raising the dead and coming to life are opposing gestures. They ‘found’ a sphinx beneath the sphinx in Giza just yesterday, as if rehearsing for having looked back too soon and gaining a false inheritance. As if discovering a demon and naming it luck to alleviate the possession. The world does not enter spring now, it’s possessed by spring, the child in the womb demanding arrival that will break you if you don’t let her through. This year she moves to break you, simply by revealing what you’ve kept alive in her absence. This year she’s early how a mirage is early during drought, how chaos is during false spring, announcing a shadow turned void, and my music is a sound bridge for them to walk across the void, Ra announces. I have used it, it is true, though it recoils if you step out too soon.

In 1965, after the assassination of Malcolm X, James Baldwin holds a press conference in London and says two things I’m sampling into infinity, when he’s asked to play Malcolm’s expat proxy, the sphinx beneath the sphinx. I’m in the dark too, he admits, and when they prod further and demand, will there be retaliation, he assures them, there is certainly no one else on the scene with those particular attributes right now, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be by 5 O’Clock this afternoon. Black Spring is coming, he warns, with a demure smirk, resurrection is inevitable, you didn’t look back fast enough to send that energy spiraling down; you didn’t look back at all. The spirit of spring corrects such negligence, sometimes it over-corrects and succumbs to decadence. This time it’s a cat’s game, a tit-for-tat between the fallen that we must watch as out-of-shape wannabe gladiators try and take one another. It’s empire’s terrible afterparty but no one will go home or even turn the obsolete rappers’ new demos down. Orpheus, please, look ahead, we swoon, it’s springtime again.

When evil men suffer, go to prison, or fake their deaths and assume disguises like a blond wig or Ready Player forever, the parties fall apart. The parties were preemptive pardons for evil men aware that if they did their crimes together in a bad performance of a pseudo social life, remorselessly, over stiff drinks, aroused by their victims and one another, they would never really be punished. They themselves wrote and enforced the laws and social contracts they were breaking, and invented the parties they were ruining, the groomed the souls they were violating and were groomed themselves. If they could avoid succumbing to guilt and shame and needing to spend all their waking hours dissociating and dissembling, if they could keep their psyches together with no intervention by something like a conscience, they would experience no consequences other than the minor inconvenience of harboring lurid, unspeakable secrets within a tribe of jesters mistaken for serious people. Unfortunately, having no rhythm where Orpheus had an excess it, they too looked back too soon, felt the heart flutter with the excitement of lawlessness, and gazed upon the abyss as it reconstituted for them and pulled them down. Now Trump is in Iran flailing and on television looking to have a casual case of Bell’s Palsy, a disorder with such a pretty name it’s a shame it makes you lopsided. And Jay-Z is in GQ wearing a Kifwebe mask in effort to assert social authority while pretending to reunite with decency, while the Epstein spirit has reconfigured as Palm Beach Pete, live on Jimmy Fallon, Ghislaine (can’t spell her name without AI) Maxwell was spotted in Canada wearing a platinum blond wig and a dumbfounded look, and there’s the frenzy over the suspected death of Netanyahu and the generative AI videos of him speaking from the crypt to dispel those giddy rumors, and Usher and J. Cole are both insinuating their loyalty for their imprisoned leader Sean Combs, on podcasts, very serious and almost devotional in tone as they imply he’s more misunderstood than monster. They are coming back too soon, having failed to master the art of retreat in war, nervous and desperate for that old feeling of unconditional dominance, too old and evil to access it like before. They should have acted more like Prince, more regal and cold and cunning. It’s been ten springs since the death of Prince Rogers Nelson, and people on the internet are attempting to valorize 2016, maybe out of longing for him, maybe as a shield from impending April snow. He knows better than to resurface so early, but who’s to say he won’t by evening. We are looking back too soon, while the present pounces you were looking at the dead wood, as the dead would, too soon.

The cheerful ruthlessness of the lyric I cried for you, now it’s your turn to cry over me, the syllogistic cruelty of it, the gloating of it, the nice-nasty generosity of calling condemnation a turn, your turn, the bend in a sonnet, your opportunity to suffer the grief your tried to impart, never fades from this song, it is a gasp, a rollick, and it energizes singer and listener. The Copenhagen audience offers a rousing applause. Thank you, I kinda feel like I’m still flying, Sassy answers. And she attempts an interlude of candid repartee with her rapt audience. She has just dazzled them, now a dose of the mundane: We’ve been…sitting in airports, and we’ve been waiting for airplanes… that never came, she offers. So we sat and we sat and we sat… and we never did make our job last night, we missed that one. Almost missed this one. And then, a confession so foiling the preceding lyric’s jubilance, you could almost miss it, she narrows her throat to cradle a whisper near gag as if about to divulge a dark secret, I’m so tired, too… she loosens, grabbing a nearby music stand to brace herself as she tells it and squinting like a child looking into the sun during eclipse. She even adds a muffled and disarming giggle, a bend the opposite of the regal bow she managed during her command to cry over me; this time her change in orientation more like a hobble on the verge of voluntary collapse. Neither her drummer and bassist (both white men in suits standing like soldiers), nor any of the spectators commiserate or give any indication of solidarity. They’re waiting impatiently to be entertained, employed, mercenary, provided with the merchandise they purchased as tickets to this 1969 jazz festival. Noticing the unanimous indifference, she straightens, and you could miss this too; she blows the audience two limp kisses, wipes her upper lip in a motion that looks like zipping it (I’ve said too much, been too vulnerable), like taking back that incident of candor before it’s deemed scandal or failure to perform as a “professional,” and she reenters the set with the line, now a dagger impaling her a little— what now my love.

Unrehearsed moments are the true revelations during live sets and this one reveals a level of smug disregard for the artist’s exhaustion that, in the west, is just decorum, politeness, the built-in entitlement of those who attend shows to be entertained by the fantasy of intimacy, not the grit and gridded stagger of it. Maybe she’s been preemptively deemed “a lush” or had a drink or two backstage, maybe her backstage or offstage demeanor is leaking into her act, and her surroundings, from the lighting, to the crowd, to her bandmates, seem passive aggressively hostile to it. An alternative might have been cheers, more applause to encourage her, an audience breaking character to hoot and yelp and sing her praises, you got this, carry on Sassy, your voice sounds beautiful, and we love you, we’re here to see you not your representative, no need to be a robot swarming from song to song nervously, it’s our turn to cry over you. But this was no arena for that improvised call-and-response, all that jazz. And you can see her shrink and stabilize ever so subtly into the mechanized album cover Sarah Vaughan who never gets tired, misses a gig, or has the misfortune of a delayed or canceled flight. Nothing is inconvenient in the lives of the make-believe-divas, everything, from the voice to the perfectly tailored gown, the flawless wig or silk press, is effortless. The only time she stumbles is when the song calls for it, as if the song and the space between songs is a script to which she is eternally beholden and she’s a mere marionette. Her moments of disorientation or rest must be cast away as errors, nuisance, moments that indicate a need to rehearse better for the next gig. And the record skips while looping your turn to cry, your turn to cry, your turn to cry

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In an inverse performance of devil-may-care ennui or fatigue, Rahsaan Roland Kirk eagerly, gregariously pauses to distribute bumps of cocaine to people in the first row of his concert. He opens a majestic leather pouch strapped to him along with his horns, and passes them a miniature wooden spoon with a little white powder on it, their pied piper with pixie dust. He snorts some himself, goes back to offering, and because he’s blind, the offers involve him also looking stranding in bright light, as if into eclipse or abyss, and smiling, a plug’s sweet braille of drugs and medicine. His band keeps playing behind him. And he promptly resumes playing both from his mouth and his nose, our air bender indulging a mini-bender between songs.

That he died of a stroke at forty-one, after being partially paralyzed by a first stroke a couple years early, could be unrelated. Nonetheless, offstage behavior taking center-stage was a bit of lawless glory against the purgatory of all that shine. Nonetheless, he kept performing and creating incidents. Perhaps he needed a stimulant to bypass fatigue, and it was great while it lasted. In that we all know that there will never be peace, he assures on one record, brightmoments of joy, through the universe. His crescendo, because parables and tenderness are always being undercut by the ribald and other ruptures, never comes. I think about these lines on impossible peace as often as I do Nina Simone irreverent in Montreux, exposing her big feelings. She can’t believe the world needs songs of abject sorrow, and she’s right to have a tantrum about it. The whole thing of peace has passed us all by, Rahsaan reminds, soothingly, like that’s a lucky break. To break character while on stage is to create your own matrix of luck, to betray yourself, show your true self, on purpose, so you’re harder to blackmail and control privately. Strategy, in that we all know that there will never be peace.1

strobing in my room like a lost planetary body sans soleil. It’s the title that captivates first. God does get stuck playing god, put another way, put away in a trunk where costumes are kept just in case you need a tutu, a superhero, or a prayer cloak — even though no children live here dressing up is customary and we are all God’s sun-drenched child.

And this excerpt from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, an antidote to what I found in the DOJ Library where the literary cannon helped artwash the cannibalism, the literal cannibalism

We fail children, and are children, so we fail ourselves. I’ll keep writing about child stars until there are none. There was this beautiful moment, speaking to Lonnie Holley as he explored his abandoned and vandalized land just outside of Birmingham this weekend, when he found a Michael Jackson shrine he’d made of sandstone in 1983, buried beneath debris. I can cut! He exclaimed, proud of the pop star likeness he’d etched, reunited with his fellow. I asked him if he’d ever had a gun to protect the property when he was contested and he and his kids pushed off their land. He said a small .22 but recoiled at the thought of it. He brought the recovered Michael home with him.

Here he is singing about walking

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It gets more intimate, as a former Harvard professor named Lisa New, host of PBS’s Poetry in America, which Epstein helped fund, is, through JeffreyVacation, asking Woody Allen for a poetry favor. She wants Woody to read and discuss William Carlos Williams’s This is Just to Say, for a Harvard archive. She mentions enjoying a conversation they had about the poem “on the plane last spring.” What plane, I’m wondering, and where were they heading? It seems New may have spent her second honeymoon on Epstein Island. The poem in question, for those who might not be familiar or need reminding, is about furtively eating plums kept in an icebox, they are, so sweet, and so cold. It’s full of the kind of innuendo aspiring or practicing pedophiles might cherish, once innocent and almost romantic in its erotics of spite, and now forever tainted by their attention. The third Baraka obituary emerges like a ruins melting in the icebox.

An email with the subject “Supermarket Antithesis,” from a redacted sender, quotes Mary Oliver “When it is over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” And says nothing else. Perhaps it’s a death threat.

Deepak Chopra enters the circus chorus to quote Rumi, a line as deep as any meme in translation and out of context, a line about dispersion. Their correspondence goes between debating the nature of the universe, dumb punchlines, and the literal sharing of itineraries. They seem to feel or pretend to feel, deep together, and as if they’ve transmuted the material world with pop psychics, Rumi memes, and vacation plans. A bromance. Disgusting. I remember when my widowed mother started reading Deepak in the 90s and I began to worry that she might have been losing her mind; it seemed safer for her to keep getting wine drunk and passing out before another day of teaching school to unassuming children. Deepak was a harder narcotic. And speaking of the unassuming children, of how nobody loves a genius child, it makes sense that a man charged with violating children with such unflinching dedication would seek some solace and absolution in poems that induce sometimes vague, sometimes specific proximity to them. I strive for genius machines, one scholar declares to Epstein in a manifesto about a lab where he will train robots to come to life, perhaps to come to life as poets, and inspire love. Epstein expresses disdain for the word quantum in another love note to Deepak. Soon Yi is included in the Woody Allen discussion and Lisa New writes see you soon, Jeffrey, and mentions she’s seeking funding for poetry and character development, poetry and science.

Jeffrey himself sends someone a Robert Frost poem, he and Lisa discuss Lolita, she volunteers, I think I lent my copy to one of my kids, and suggests if Jeffrey enjoys Lolita he would love Willa Cather’s My Antonia. They seem to share, in this exchange, an affection for literature that meticulously imagines alienated and distressed children, genius children, genius machines. New asks Epstein to help invite Serena Williams on her show, suggesting that she read a poem about child birth as this is around the time Willaims endured a difficult labor. Later in the now tedious list of poets and poetry adjacent emails in the files, a debate with Allen Ginsberg on child pornography comes up, with some indication that Ginsberg may have been lenient on the topic, already a longstanding rumor but somehow darker when corroborated in this dark library. Epstein and Lisa Discuss Woody Allen’s film Blue Jasmine. They haggle a bit more about Lisa’s invitations to big names, and he instructs her to be more cavalier and flattering, less academic and supplicating. A deposition mentions Epstein gifting a woman the book An Invitation to Poetry alongside Victoria’s Secret lingerie. The Woody Allen footage remains unreleased, we learn, much to Lisa New’s dismay. When I lose track of that thread I find some messages between Woody and Jeffrey, real pals, discussing shower gel one gifted the other and how it’s all natural, no chemicals.

This is just to say, I have read through the emails of some of the most depraved men on earth, and their only approximations of salvation come through poems. The strangest thing about them, discussing these poems like campaign strategies and casual accessories to dangerous fantasies, is that they don’t even seem, on the surface, all that dysfunctional. They seem like alienated nerds so bad at language they use the bodies of children and other people’s stanzas for syntax, for sensation they cannot access elsewhere; they don’t understand that depth is not contingent on inflicting pain and then disguising it as philanthropic, feeble repentance, or research for the creation of genius machines to front the money for educational shows about poetry on PBS. The Epstein Class includes every poet in America who thinks it possible to tell the truth without naming the lie, who thus upholds and heralds the lie, relies on it for comparative virtue. Poetry itself, as a vessel for beauty and truth, can never be diminished by these misaffiliations, but the poet, grinning on a show with an island tan or an island stipend, should not have eaten the plums.

We have created a culture in which the only tools we have for rehabilitation are being hijacked to enhance social distortion and most people seem to think we should appreciate being hijacked, take the check, and be quiet. Their mouths are that half -bloody ivory of someone who got punched and pretended not to notice so he wouldn’t have to fight back. Children, unaware of their access to pathos or dissociation, don’t fight the right way, don’t yet know how to trade sorrow and suffering for favor and heroism in the state’s literary imagination. They aren’t yet trapped in that pathetic loop with you. They fight back without realizing, reflexively and in earnest, with stranger fruit. One of the episodes of Poetry in America uses Billie Holiday’s image singing “Strange Fruit” in the same opportunistic way Deepak cites Rumi. Poetry as one of neoliberalism’s scapegoats for the Epstein Class, is violence. They wash the blood and lust away with its chivalrous mysticism and eat its young.

Baraka left me a clue into how they manufacture their weapons, told me who was doing the punching, fancy meeting you here and, here’s the truth, you hear me? Pastoral breeze of the gallant crypt keepers. He whispers from purgatory, intervening on my stupor, interrupting my I dare you to go see for yourself search to punch me in the mouth where new doves bloom.

This is also in the files

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Meanwhile, this week’s back-to-back race-baiting absurdities include: Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan are called hard r nigg— by a white man with Tourette Syndrome at an awards show while on stage presenting. The cadence of shock mingled with showmanship on both their faces is now indelibly etched in the minds of anyone who’s seen the footage. Delroy Lindo looks like he’s being choked, reenacting the first kill scene in a horror movie that will devolve into gratuitous gore. The editors were kind enough to remove a homophobic slur uttered by the same man and a call to “Free Palestine” before the program aired, but left the hard, roaring capital r and the stunned faces in a familiar social experiment whose instructions are: extract life force energy from black people by any means necessary, but it’s most effective when you incite rage and hurt simultaneously and scramble their nervous systems, martyr those men just enough, make them wobble and go into shock and persevere so everyone watching feels like it’s happening the them too, since it’s such a familiar black experience. Stoic disgust is the new rage, however, and it’s painless to observe the spiritually stunted as they beg for a piece of your aura, and they didn’t meet their quota. Tuesday, Mardi, Mars’s playground, Judith Butler was presented with a Franz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award. I know we’re meant to worship Butler; she taught in the Rhetoric department when I was a student in that department at U.C. Berkeley, and alongside a woman named Kaja Silverman, was a campus celebrity of such magnitude I thought her reach was global and I suppose it was. Personally, I preferred Silverman, who dressed like Carrie Bradshaw for her seminars on Freudian psychology, but Butler, being less niche, was more revered. Revered enough to be conflated with Franz Fanon on a Tuesday in Black History Month. I have no further comment on that, I will not lend it any more energy than it’s already receiving, as scandal, as so not funny it’s almost funny and not for me, and some don’t mind it, and maybe it is inadvertent tactlessness, and maybe it’s deliberate.

In the interval between those two days, I lost a battle with editors at PBS, to make all the b’s in my piece on Sun Ra for them lower case b’s. This was a minor spar, and one with which I’m intimately familiar as I win and lose the same silent debate often. I don’t understand what the capital B or Black capital will do to prevent the spectacle of hard r’s and harder appropriations of the legacies of black artists and scholars, the inundation of think pieces expected of us in response, and the look we’ll see in the eyes Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan at their next appearance, perhaps the Oscars or Image Awards, as they brace for the impact of a new gaze, one awaiting their crash-out or the dignified it’s all fine and dandy, offered up like a flash of wound sublimated by the teeth inflicting it. I suppose that’s why the editors of the version of the BAFTAs made public and syndicated, left that specific footage untouched, because it would force black speech even if that speech is silent renunciation. This too is an aspect of language, the guts of poetry, showing, distended. That puppeting of our voices is just as intense when its intention is a grammatical altruism made trite and almost offensive by how it’s upheld as law while real life decency is bypassed as often as every day of every week, to such an extent that it no longer warrants any performance of frenzied confusion and certainly doesn’t make us as mad as we were from 2008-16, on cue like paid actors and in earnest. These new efforts are perfect crimes committed against finally imperfect victims. It could be construed as ableist or transphobic to call out Butler or that man whose fractured subconscious was amplified for ratings. We’re in a Pinter play and no one knows her lines.

Here are some from his Betrayal that revolve around similar themes, being old-fashioned in all the wrong ways, etcetera:

Let the b get low and deep into the sunken place where the lack it prefaces can really accrue and linger, no capital, no accusations of having made it into the upper echelon where only those who ‘cannot control their speech’ or cannot conceal their enthusiasm, spew offenses, meant endearingly of course, if meant at all. Do you ever wonder how boring it is, capital B Boring, to be placated by souls you’ve outlived and outwitted in every dimension? So boring you let them play once in a while and the Tower of Babel grows higher from falling.

The anxiety Nate, “RiTchie” expresses lyrically as a wish for safe exclusivity, is also sublimated grieving of former selves, as he and the group’s producer Parker Corey officially release the trio Injury Reserve and the late third member and friend, Stepa J. Groggs, conjuring a storm to wash away the residual sorrow, which presents in interaction with them as quiet, even secretive reverence verging on retreat. Can I have time for myself, the lyrics echo in the awkward silence between revvings for the PR machine’s what’s next refrain, ever banal, ever persistent. Parker and RiTchie defy the nagging with deep focus, their own exclusive union around a sense of purpose that reads as an unspoken manifesto. They’re both clear about the ongoing deterioration of the music industry, and the ways its failure to enact basic protections of human musicians and listeners from usurp by AI, algorithmic manipulation, mega-festival monopolies, and other marks of the beast, will force some reckoning and redistribution of music’s meaning-making and revenue generating potential. These trends don’t deter them, they seem to intensify their work ethic. I volunteer that it helps that they’re refusing to be whisked into the devoutly middle-brow, the crop of musicians who are introducing audiences to sounds so mediocre they’ll welcome compositions powered by Artificial Intelligence as an upgrade. In my estimation, this is the clear agenda, make the human music miserable-sounding enough and AI will be reprieve.

My Ghosts Go Ghost struggles, grapples, with how to function outside of such misguided market forces, how to become new without becoming dishonest, dilute, and silly, how to stay true without being some kind of missionary for authenticity.

It helps that they reside in Phoenix, Arizona and not New York or Los Angeles. They’re a world and a time zone away from the heart of the hype machine they’ll be asked to feed and force fed in the name of rap. They’ve traded decorative flowers for medicinal chaparral and creosote and seem repentant for any prior association with the glamor spells the industry casts like curses. “Dead Weight,” comes in to pillage and exorcize that baggage until only the wound remains, which is dressed in serious, palpitating play on “Grapefruit,” an anthemic third track that explores the idea of commodification through controversy, all publicity being good publicity, the strict, stiff, protocol of the roll-out, which almost functions like ritualized hazing into a long-reigning fraternity that has lost most of its relevance outside of these pledges of allegiance by teams of musicians and managers and agents, etc., prestige farming.

I start to realize it’s fucking with me, RiTchie laments, submits, and the citrus is the inside-out clown suit of willing players of this game, a dead-on-arrival harvest. The worst omen. Is that all there is? While this album is classified as alternative rap, it exists in the spirit of the blues, approaching language and production with the downcast gear-clashing jitters of free spirits reveling in having been spit out by the monsters, ejected into a journey home that complains about and savors the road until the distinction between home and wandering, procedure and autonomy blurs or glitches in the glare of company gift cards and expense accounts, mouths to feed and mouths to tape shut before too much is revealed. There’s a palpable and unresolved urge to duck and dodge made vivid and literal on “Zig Zag” a sparring revenge fantasy, self-against-self again, and braced by production that refuses to succumb, insisting on cinematic grandeur to soothe the grit and regret.

Billy Woods’ cameo on “Best Interest” is celestial folkloric backup when the duo seems stranded in their set of preoccupations; he reroutes them just enough to give the album a volta and let it unravel and transcend its hyper-fixations toward a dance floor purge or cathartic incident. The final song is that incident, an urge toward elegy at last obliged, the hidden title track. It’s a moody and triumphant conversation with the other side, the clairsentient living dead bound up with the left-behind, a shared nervous system of metallic strings, pleading don’t let me go until it feels like the go, is the command, forced exile, and the ghost is given up. If a band is a chosen family, this is how you keep a family together, by letting everyone come and go as they please, honoring both duty and impulse, free will and destiny. Children help with that; when the child begins fidgeting, overdue for a nap, we disperse. I imagine RiTchie’s voice as his son’s personal white noise machine, in the nursery lullaby-making, and replay the album as that dream song, the score for an unfinished film, hearing the song cycle now as an inventory of what and who will be here when the storm is over.

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Now adjacent the ‘luxury’ apartment complex, APEX, this run-down Venetian style Variety Arts Theater turned vessel for artworld wonder, was swarming with eager bodies, thousands maybe, over the course of the Sunday event, and reading among them, with them, in a room draped in red velvet, felt seance-like, and not unlike having entered a house of worship, sensations intensified by the fact that the date was February 15th, the anniversary of the death of my father, which has become a fainter and fainter annual agony over the years in that I rarely have time to stop for death the way death kindly stopped for him. So I read and played poem fragments in audio-color in silent dedication until we could imagine being children again, auditioning for talent agents or our own parents’ affections, for school admissions officers, for teams and camps and cliques and groomers and handlers and self-respect not withstanding if we made it, there were consequences, increased expectations. You could end up like Bieber, in a persistent and persistently mocked or trivialized shambles of talent and fame, needing Jesus to help clean your owners’ money and being usurped by pagan poetry.

I reveled in reading about the plight of those like him in the town the invents them. I played seven unrepentant minutes from my digital notebook and made us listen in silence in the dim red room as if parishioners in a broken church. Church is such a vulgar-toned word already when you really hear it; it sounds sinister and like a bad gargling noise coming from a weary body before it sputters out. Include the “mega” prefix and you get an impoverishment of vulgarity so effective at its defects, I had no choice but to announce them. The sound element contained a litany against Ellen DeGeneres that boasts “a child star hates to her coming, a viral kid hates to see her coming.” I was at the nail salon a few weeks ago and a woman in the industry divulged to me the casual invites she’s received to orgies hosted by Ellen. You hardly have to ask if you carry the right frequency in this town, the secrets are always seeking you, lucid and eager to be lapis and laughed with, and you’re always there. My church is one of close listening, an acuity that feels like reading with the ears, confrontational, intimate, and inevitable overhearing of what can never be unheard or silenced once it has your brief attention. So I gave Justin a piece of his wish before performing any of my own language, a found sermon. It seemed effective, ascetic, like music in my body and parts of my dad singing and apologizing for his role in the cycle I now write about like it’s abstract or objectifiable when it’s just my experience ruining different subjects who I try to defend since they can no longer defend themselves coherently. A nation of false prodigies sold into soft prostitution.

Some friends were in the audience and we wandered the ghost theater in a stupor together for an hour or so, before settling in a basement bar where the crowd smoked indoors while we sipped Evian and snacked on olives and bubble gum. Just around the corner, someone cosplayed a ravaged club heaux cosplaying a hooker. All around the building Louis Armstrong was singing in delight and dismay, threatening demolition of the hype beast spirit with his vibrato. We discussed grief, decanted some. Two guys who seemed giddy and disoriented, one carrying a full bottle of wine, walked up to us to compliment the reading and offer notes: that was a lot of audio though, before giving us all daps and stumbling off, the only review I need — exuberant, honest, proof that my desire to withhold in the service of close listening, my intention that evening, had succeeded just enough. They didn’t want to listen, but they didn’t leave. Disclosure kindly stopped for them. And moved on. When you’re invited to join a social experiment, don’t be too gentle. A sign for a Miley Cyrus show called “End of the World” adorned the wall just behind us, an Alec Baldwin doppelganger (mostly in the hair gel) I’d been noting aloud as such for a while looked over and smiled like he’d heard me and approved. A whimsical, chimeric smile. That phantom thread unraveling. And we dispersed like sweet embers, into the body of fire horse.

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Here’s the audio I played for the occasion. A wave of lightly edited notebook selections Ellen crests into all gaudy and guilty. The wine-drunk homies never lied, it’s a lot of audio.

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My sudden urge to read Nabokov is either coincidental or a subtle, slow-tilting trauma response to the files, though I don’t feel myself imploding under the weight of the new data, full of to me redundant revelations about the deviants and cannibals who have installed the New World Order that is now wavering, if not toppling, if not being topped off by your newfound awareness of their sins, sins which they consider miracles and favors they perform in exchange for their performance of power and your compliance. The performance is incoherent enough to seem spectacular, it scrambles the senses and trains them to grope for a center and call that reaching its rigor. They consider a culling of all who will not agree and be quiet, and be impressed, and be pacified, and be worked, and danced on the decks of ships and stored in the holds like cattle for slow kill. Half in love with easeful death, I doubt they mind the threat of guillotine or disappearing that could come of their being found out, but being the easefully walking dead we dare not inflict a punishment so severe it would rob us of our access to jesters and the evil joust they carry like pop singers on tour forever.

And how would Proust feel (narrow road to the interior)1

And Faustian delusion in nihilism’s fields, lavender fields

Kim Fields’ sister, a child star on Nickelodeon’s The Secret World of Alex Mack and also my nervous-eyed school mate. The smile in her gaze turned to sandstone and vigil after the show. Far cry from the Robert Frost auditorium where our assemblies were held and school plays like Our Town performed, to the set of real television, but not very far after all in the tradition of exclaiming: I just do not know, where there is to get to. Basho keeps walking through seventeenth century Japan, I’ll keep walking too, reciting Prince’s “Seventeen Days” and thinking of the magazine that taught me how to pray for thigh gaps and doll’s eyes until they came naturally like a shadow in the mirror.

What deflection works best on men who center girlchildren as their preeminent love interests while positioning themselves in direct opposition to girlhood, cannibalizing the girls who might impede this aim by respecting ourselves too much.

No, literally, eating the children and calling them jerky while they play dead or play follow-the-leader and you’re in the game too, an initiate by dissociation refusing to imagine where else there is to get to in consciousness and therefore in form.

More restless than distressed, I can’t decide between finishing Prince’s autobiography, The Beautiful Ones, plucked form Kahlil’s library like a flower from a veiled garden, reading some Alice Notley poems, watching Being John Malkovich, or rereading Lolita, a book that almost convinces the reader that the deranged man, for being so orderly and intentional in his derangements, is the tender heroic man, the one who saves the girl he ruins. What if obsession is salvation for men who love girlchildren, we’re asked, in an unironic Russian accent, what if it sends them into limber, lifelong rituals that inflect their time with more meaning than ours? Should you envy them, should you be more like them, should you beg for an invitation to their island like Elon did in the documents? Should their terribleness be a minor digression between albums?

And here comes Bad Bunny, Bugs Bunny, the flags, the cane fields shrugging and shredded into asses or assets that wag better than fingers, and together we are convinced that “The Americas” have enacted a purposeful and symbolic realignment through twelve minutes of almost sublime party music, pardon music. If you need culture to be redeemed or called redeeming out of habit or sweet cowardice claiming civility, don’t come around here. Here, what’s barren is called barren, even if the whole world is watching in anticipation of praise songs and apologia and it’s also legendary and unprecedented and good for business and very convincing and well-choreographed and I was dancing along myself as if making a self tape for an audition, as if pleading— cast me as girl 7 with ass in air for the next act.

In light of what many are discovering for the first time about how the world functions and malfunctions from behind and ahead and beyond them, I’m discovering something too. I’m blue about it in a so what or I really don’t care do you way. But I should care, and I do. In an adieu, let’s go away from here, way. I wake up every day and load my wagon with the will to resist it even as I succumb. I walk so many steep miles, stretch, dance, read, huddle, light the stationary torches each evening and pray over microgreens and berries and these letters, until I’m my own Lolita variation, my own impossibly aloof muse, exuberant but never satisfied. A good friend calls himself a brat tamer while over to help me install a shower filter that will make my hair and skin so soft and luminous. I wince internally like a struck animal, like a tamed creature turning against her false self, and I think him and his spastic puppy, for their service, their camaraderie, this softness of stands and stranded intensity.

One dilemma of the fall of North America is that we seem to have survived it or braced ourselves against it by carrying the weight of the debris as our beauty and favorite music. We’ve become one with its tragic flaws. We have been successfully harvested, reaped, in exchange for how flattering it is to be up for the role of girl 7 in the imaginary musical version of happily every after in oblivion. I watched the light in her eyes turn mercenary, off or on depending on the cameras and call times. Some of my favorite men watch football casually but religiously. A buzz kill or untamed brat, I blame them as much as I do myself, for lacking the restraint it would take to make a new culture, one that doesn’t glorify the worst things about itself and demand art and music that accommodate that gaming. We fall in line too easily, worse than falling in love too easily, eagerly discussing the clever intricacies of the halftime show as though they absolve the past and present siege. As though it’s pleasure to be the intended audience for these long commercials for the reordering of the world order. As though lighthearted despair is the unifying pleasure for girl 7, ass in the air as the crowd cheers.

George Clinton made the one true song, “America Eats its Young,” sampled by J Dilla on his deathbed, and reenacted here. One day, when it’s no use, we’ll reject these carefully curated distractions from ourselves. In anticipation of that coming indifference, they get slicker, more intoxicating, more like mergers of house and field, radical pacifist gentry nonbinary elite fictions of the unassailable hope machine.

I decided to listen to the rest of the Prince story as read by my friend esperanza, while walking on my walking pad and texting myself the lines of poems that only arrive when the body is moving and listening. He performed at the Super Bowl too. Now he’s dead and his flesh is fed to me in small respectable portions of impossible nostalgia. The book is unfinished, a literary haunted house. Even when he arrives at his adult years, he hasn’t recovered from his childhood. And you get the sense that he’s more estranged than dead, banished to another dimension where he’s leading a better life, that he figured out where to get to and is just about to tell you when it all collapses into school pictures and set lists.

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To The Deep North

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