I wrote about Maná in Friday’s newsletter. The Mexican band Maná was nominated to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year. Their nomination is especially significant because they’re the first rock group to be nominated that primarily sings in Spanish. This is a great article explaining why this is the perfect moment in history to induct such a deserving band. My dad—a Spanish teacher—introduced me to Maná when I was just 12 years old. I remember spending many summer days listening to their album Dónde Jugarán los Niños(#250 on the top 600), fully absorbed in the sunny vibes it radiates. My good friend Charles Hughes over at the No Fences Reviewknows that I’ve been a long-time Maná fan, so he asked me to do a write-up for one of their songs for his newsletter, “Turn It Up – Rock Hall Nominees, Part 1” (also check out Part 2). This is what I wrote:
At a time when many Latinx artists had to “cross over” by singing in English to expand their reach, Mexican band Maná just kept rocking out en español. Their sound is a fusion of diverse genres—rock & roll, of course, but also reggae, ska, and funk. In many of their songs, lead singer Fernando “Fher” Olvera gives voice to love’s yearnings and heartbreaks. Llorar (crying) is often compared with llover (raining) and you’ll frequently hear words that rhyme with corazón (heart). The song “Cuando los Ángeles Lloran” (When Angels Cry) is a softer ballad that has all the classic Maná sounds, but with an added lyrical depth that highlights an aspect of the group I admire—their protest. It tells the story of Chico Mendes, the Brazilian activist murdered in 1988 for his efforts to protect the Amazon rainforest. Here, too, llorar and llover mix together, but for a different reason: when an earthly angel like Mendes dies, the angels above cry along with us—and it rains. Beyond their environmental and social advocacy, Maná tells stories that connect with the human experience. It’s why they’ve remained a staple in the Latin rock scene for so long—transcending borders and generations, and absolutely earning this historic nomination.
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. … Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimism and pessimism.
There’s a middle ground, according to Solnit, that exists between being too positive or too negative. It’s the room where hope resides. Maybe we can find other things in that room too.
The cult British singer-songwriter Bill Fay died this past week at 81. I was only vaguely familiar with his work from Jeff Tweedy having routinely covered his song “Be Not So Fearful” (also featured in this scene of the excellent I Am Trying to Break Your Heart documentary).
I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life—finding songs in the corner of the room.
For much of his life, Fay’s music lived on the periphery. His recording career started in the early ‘70s and abruptly ended only a few years afterward. Later, his career would have a resurgence of sorts after being rediscovered my musicians like Tweedy, among others.
Fay’s comment about “finding songs in the corner of the room” circles us back to something else Solnit writes of hope:
How the transformation happens … recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.
Bill Fay didn’t occupy the limelight and our hope doesn’t have to either. This doesn’t make it any less transformational or less powerful. In fact, it does just the opposite.
Rest in peace, Bill Fay. You can read the whole newsletter here.
Jellyfish made of recycled plastic water bottles at the
Monkey Bar
At the very beginning of 2025, I wrote a newsletter about letting go to welcome in. The Spanish put this idea into action beautifully during Las Fallas de Valencia. Artists create beautiful monuments called fallas in the main plaza of the city that serve as a commentary on current social issues. Then, on the final day of the festival, they set the fallas ablaze in an event called La Cremà (see pictures here)—a symbolic cleansing and renewal of society. I like the idea of letting something go to create space for something new.
Las Fallas will be in full swing soon. The festival takes place each year from the 1st to 19th of March in Valencia, Spain. You can check out this year’s festival map and explore the festival website to learn more about what makes this such a special event (also refer to Rosetta Stone’s guide and this article from Move to Traveling). The following video gives a good idea of the esthetic and emotion involved with Las Fallas.
We tend to welcome in the new year with so much hope for the future. As winter wears on in the colder parts of the world—and as administrations change—that hope can quickly diminish. February, after all, is the worst month of the year. It would seem to make sense, then, that Las Fallas takes place in the spring—a season of rebirth and renewal. Maybe there are some things that we’d all like to see burn and go away right about now.
In Grenada, recycling plastics is difficult. But there’s a group here that’s working hard to change that—they’ve organized a plastics drop-off that happens once a month. We save any plastic recyclables we accumulate throughout the month and when the next drop-off date arrives, we load them up and make the trip. The Monkey Bar also helps alleviate the plastics issue—they repurpose plastic bottles in many of their art installations (see the jellyfish featured above).
Instead of burning away the bad to make space for the good, I wonder if we might just remember the good we’ve forgotten—recycle it and bring it back. Can we recycle our hope once we’ve lost it?
Last Sunday, Angie and I hiked out to Hog Island. Right now, it’s the dry season in Grenada and our trek felt strangely similar to what we’d experience on a very nice autumn’s day in Wisconsin. The leaves are changing colors, ever so slightly—light yellows and browns—and some are even falling off their trees. The temperature has calmed down a bit and the sun hits you at just the right angle so as to create the golden, breezy feel of fall.
Trees were all around us and I was thinking about hope. Sarah Vos, of the Dead Horses, has a song called “Swinger in the Trees” (see full lyrics), that is based, in part, on a Robert Frost poem called “Birches” (see reference). The song ends like this:
All these strangers Passing by me But we choose not to see, Yeah we choose not to see (I wanna be) Oh, we choose not to see
There is always hope, There is always hope. There is always hope (I wanna be) A swinger in the trees
There is always hope, folks. Choose to see it. Recycle it and reuse it. And, watch Sarah Vos sing about it here:
Two days ahead of the album’s release, Bad Bunny posted a short film (also titled DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS) featuring Jacobo Morales, the much beloved Puerto Rican filmmaker, actor, director, and poet. The 12-minute film addresses the problem of gentrification on the island as tax incentives make it easier for foreign businesses to take up residency there. In the opening scene we see the 90-year-old Morales dig up a small box of photos, marked by a small Puerto Rican flag in the middle of a field, while he reminisces about the magic of the Puerto Rico that used to be—a magic he goes on to say is still there. Also in the film is Morales’s small friend Concho, a native toad that has come to symbolize Puerto Rican identity and cultural memory. The sapo concho is in danger of extinction, much like Puerto Ricans themselves who continually confront forces driving them away from the island. Morales is wonderful in the film, co-directed by Benito A. Martínez Ocasio (a.k.a. Bad Bunny) and Arí Maniel Cruz Suárez. He also makes an endearing appearance in the official video for the song “BAILE INoLVIDABLE,” where he joins a lesson to learn how to dance salsa.
I wanted to write more about the themes developed in the short film because they’re worth taking a closer look at. There’s a lot going on. This is what Morales says to open the film:
Español:
Qué muchas cosas he vivido. Conocí mucha gente. Gente buena. Fui a muchos países. ¡A casi todas partes del mundo! Pero ninguna como Puerto Rico… O como lo que era antes. Aquí había algo… No sé qué. Una magia increíble. Y todavía la hay. Todavía la hay.
Quisiera haber tirado más fotos, Para enseñarte. Las fotos son momentos vividos. Recuerdos de cosas que pasaron. Yo no era de estar tirando fotos por ahí. Ni estar subiendo stories ni nada de eso. Yo decía que era mejor vivir el momento. Pero, cuando llegas a esta edad, Recordar no es tan fácil. Debí tirar más fotos. Haber vivido más. Debí haber amado más, Cuando pude. Mientras uno está vivo, Uno debe amar lo más que pueda.
English:
How many things I’ve lived. I met a lot of people. Good people. I went to a lot of countries. Almost to every part of the world! But none of them like Puerto Rico… Or how it was before. There was something… I don’t know what. An incredible magic. And it’s still there. It’s still there.
I wish I’d taken more photos, To show you. Photos are lived moments. Memories of things that have passed. I wasn’t one for going around taking pictures. Not uploading stories or any of that either. I said that it was better to live the moment. But, when you get to this age, Remembering isn’t as easy. I should’ve taken more photos. Lived more. I should’ve loved more, When I could. While you’re alive, You should love as much as you can.
These words from Morales appear in various parts of Bad Bunny’s album. In “BAILE INoLVIDABLE,” for example, the intro music that’s been building into a rocker suddenly cuts out and we hear Morales say, “Mientras uno está vivo, uno debe amar lo más que pueda,” right before a glorious salsa reincarnation of the melody takes over. In “DtMF,” Bad Bunny sings the album’s title to start off the chorus, using the same words as Morales—“Debí tirar más fotos.”
After the opening monologue, Morales begins to converse with his friend, Concho the toad, who like Morales is a native of Puerto Rico. This is a shared characteristic not to be missed. One of the main themes of the short film is Puerto Rico’s ongoing problem with gentrification and the multiple ways in which it’s displacing native Puerto Ricans on the island.
After they both realize they’re hungry, Morales goes for a walk downtown to pick up some food for the two of them. On the way, the signs of gentrification abound—foreigners living on the island blasting their music, English being spoken to the exclusion of Spanish, franchise restaurants taking over local cafes. Morales has the appearance of someone who doesn’t even recognize his hometown anymore. It all comes to a head when he tries to make a simple order at a newly-established chain restaurant and is met with a barrage of choices and inflated prices. He even has troubles paying for his order due to the restaurant’s no-cash policy. At this point, a younger Puerto Rican man intervenes to pay for him and offers an encouraging, “Seguimos aquí” (We continue here).
Songs from Bad Bunny’s new album are sprinkled throughout the short film. Upon returning home, we see Morales percolating some coffee on the stove while the song “TURiSTA”—not unintentionally—plays gently in the background. The song directly calls out the issue of tourists benefiting from the beauty of a place without being willing to help solve the challenges associated with preserving that beauty. The beauty of Puerto Rico—both in its physical landscape and the cultural identity of its people—is something worth preserving. In this song, as he does throughout the whole album, Bad Bunny is commenting on the risk of it disappearing.
As Morales and Concho enjoy their food on the back porch, Concho inquires about seeing more of Morales’s photos. After Morales reminds him that he didn’t take many, Concho suggests that they take a picture today, implying that it’s never too late to start recording their cultural identity. There’s hope for its future.
I loved this short film because I love Puerto Rico, and I love the devotion and care with which Bad Bunny positions himself as an advocate for his homeland. It’s not the first time he’s done so. In 2022, he released a music video for his song “El Apagón,” which included a documentary at the end of it called “Aquí Vive Gente” (People Live Here) that addresses how foreign investments in Puerto Rico are negatively impacting island natives. DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS also introduced me to the wonderful Jacobo Morales. I’ve since discovered more of his work, like his 1989 film Lo que le pasó a Santiago, which was the first and only one from Puerto Rico to be nominated for an Academy Award.
I also loved the film because—as good ones often do—it challenged my own thinking about important issues. I’ve done a fair amount of traveling in my life and have even lived abroad as an expat. The film’s commentary made me wonder: have I traveled and lived abroad in ways that preserve and support local communities? Or have I unknowingly aided and abetted the takeover of their spaces and the displacement of their people?
Two summers ago, for example, my wife and I stayed in an Airbnb in downtown Murcia, Spain. It was only afterward that we learned about the recent trend of foreign investors buying up downtown properties to rent out to tourists, and how this is a growing problem—contributing to a higher cost of living and the displacement of local peoples who end up being forced to live outside of their preferred urban spaces. It has led me to explore more responsible travel and adopt more sustainable practices, like regenerative tourism. We can all do better.
But at the core of the film is Morales’s attempt to preserve the cultural identity of Puerto Ricans, at a critical point in history when that identity is again being threatened. At the end of the film, Morales promises his friend that he’ll share his photos and his memories with him—both elusive attempts to capture the essence of what it means to be Puerto Rican. Photos and memories are snapshots frozen in time. They are not completely reliable in their ability to represent cultural identity, as cultural identity is active and always evolving. I think that’s why it takes the effort of a full community—not just one individual—to remember its past identity and carry it forward into the future.
Such community efforts exist. A large portion of the Puerto Rican diaspora lives in New York—or, “NUEVAYoL,” as Bad Bunny’s opening track of the album pays homage to. In 2019, two of these nuevayorkinos—Djali Brown-Cepeda and Ricardo Castañeda—started the digital archive and multimedia project Nueva Yorkinos. It’s a beautiful community project that serves as “a love letter to Nueva Yol” and the type of group effort that seeks to achieve the cultural preservation that Morales longs for in DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. Since its founding, the website “has amassed over 2,000 pieces of visual media, and 1,500 personal stories and family histories” of Puerto Rico’s diaspora in the city. Visitors can peruse the many media and stories that others have submitted, and of course, submit their own.
These are the kinds of projects we need to ensure that the marginalized have a voice and that their stories are heard. This, too, is what Bad Bunny is using his platform and creative energies to accomplish. His final lyrics on the album leave a powerful and definitive statement:
Español:
De aquí nadie me saca, De aquí yo no me muevo. Dile que esta es mi casa Donde nació mi abuelo. Yo soy de P fuckin’ R.
English:
Nobody’s taking me from here, I’m not moving from here. Tell them this is my house Where my grandfather was born. I’m from P fuckin’ R.
For more Bad Bunny and Jacobo Morales, check out the official music video for “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.” It’s simply excellent! It will make you excited to live your life to the fullest and to dance like no one is watching.
It’s always difficult to spend the holiday season away from family and friends. You find yourself missing the traditions you’ve long held for this time of year, along with the special events and gatherings you look forward to with such anticipation. Your place in the world shifts and you have to deal with the friction the shift produces. One way is to bring the familiar into your new space—some Christmas tunes, favorite holiday movies, putting up a few recently bought decorations (instead of the beloved ones from the bins in your attic crawl space). Another way is to open yourself to how the holidays might be celebrated in your new place—spending unexpected time with new friends or observing the little changes in honor of the holidays happening around you.
I was thinking about friction this past week when I took a break from my comforting Christmas playlist and turned on Television’s song “Friction” from their album Marque Moon. Like so many forces in life, I started to process how friction can be both good and bad. So like Santa shimmying down the chimney, this week’s newsletter is gonna involve some friction.
In Television’s song “Friction” (from the excellent Marque Moon), Tom Verlaine sings, “You complain of my diction. You give me friction” while cleverly pausing for a noticeable moment between “dic” and “tion.”
Innuendo aside, I think we need more friction. Our world tries so hard to reduce it. Get there faster. Buy it more easily. Watch it whenever you want. Our convenience culture often leaves us feeling disoriented, reaching for something solid to hold onto. The rapid pace of it all can cause us to become desensitized to the richness of all that life has to offer—blinded to what is truly valuable.
Friction can help us slow things down—see things more clearly. It can help make things a little harder so that we’re forced to grow. And it can also set up limits for us—limits that surprisingly make life more enjoyable.
I remember reading this Guardian article around the time I started getting into vinyl. In the article, Jeff Tweedy discusses why the album still matters in an age where you can just as well download individual songs from iTunes. While discussing the album Sukierae that he and his son Spencer released back in 2014, Tweedy says:
I just want to listen to the album and have a feeling that one part has ended, and now I can take a little breather before I listen to the second part. Or I can listen to the second part another time. It’s a double record on vinyl, so there are three breaks like that. I wanted it to have different identities artistically and the album format allows me to do that.
Listening to music on vinyl brings intentionality to the listening experience. There’s more friction compared to streaming an endless playlist on Spotify. You have to pay attention to when the record is finished, get up out of your seat, physically flip it over or change it, go sit back down. Changing the record requires even more friction—you take the record off the turntable, put it back in its sleeve, take a new record out of its sleeve, place it on the turntable, and so on. If you want to keep listening, you have to take all of these steps all over again. The intentionality brings mindfulness.
I also think of watching holiday specials when I was a kid. Each December, we use to pull out our living room hide-a-bed and lie down under it to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. The idea of a holiday special is mostly lost on us today, but we can still add some friction into the mix to bring the “special” back. Rather than binge-watching a show, pick a night and watch one episode weekly. Showing some restraint and delaying satisfaction makes you appreciate it the show a lot more. Like listening to vinyl, it also might help you watch the show more mindfully.
This is true of a lot of things when you think about it. It’s the reason seasons are so cool. The season changes and you have to wait a whole year to see it again. As a result, you appreciate it a lot more when it finally comes around. Limiting yourself to eating out once a month makes that night a whole lot more special than if you eat out every night.
Friction can create more mindfulness and enjoyment for us, but it has an enemy: efficiency. In his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin writes about the dangers of our efficiency-based culture:
Our continual quest for efficiency discourages looking too deeply. The pressure to deliver doesn’t grant us time to consider all possibilities. Yet it’s through deliberate action and repetition that we gain deeper insight.
Friction allows us to look deeper, but the cost of it is time. Where do you have time to sacrifice efficiency and gain the benefit of deeper insight?
In the summer of 2023, I took a lot more time when I chose to bike from Wausau to Eau Claire (a journey that ended up being 120 miles) to see a late night concert at the Blue Ox Music Festival. There was certainly a lot more friction for me riding my bike than driving my car. It was a lot harder! But, I gained a great deal from the experience. When I arrived, Them Coulee Boys were singing “Ten Feet Tall,” and that’s just about how I felt.
Entering Eau Claire County
Feeling 10 ft. tall in front of the porta potties
There are so many ways you can add some more friction to your day. And the benefits are many—you get to know yourself better, you grow as a person, and you live with more intention. Ultimately you decide what is important to you rather than letting someone else determine that for you. Life becomes a lot more meaningful and satisfying as a result.
This week I was listening to Francis Quinlan’s song “Another Season,” and I caught the word “friction” in the opening verse. It struck me as a good way to close out the end of another year:
Hey Nothin’ much, just Wrappin’ up another season What do you make of this town? Here I have been taking the long way around Do you, like me, keep closest to the most familiar friction?
My dear friend Matt Neely introduced me to David Berman in the fall of 2003. Matt and I attended grad school together and one day he lent me his CD of the album Bright Flight, by Berman’s band Silver Jews. Their current Spotify bio describes them as “a beautiful mess of indie rock, country-rock and lo-fi with lyrics both witty and profound.” After a few listens I was hooked. Beyond the scratchy guitar rifts and straightforward, yet often fractured folk-rock melodies, I really connected with Berman’s songwriting and shaky vocals. He was a lyricist who could turn a phrase like no other. His crackly deadpan delivery only added to his effectiveness as a storyteller.
One of my favorite lyrics of Berman’s comes from his song “Time Will Break The World.” I repeat it to myself each year when winter grows long and I grow tired of yet another snowfall:
The snow falls down so beautiful and stupid
Couple this with Phil Connor’s prediction from Groundhog Day and you have perfectly summarized the late-winter, early-spring feels of Wisconsin.
Berman struggled with depression and drug addiction throughout his life. Tragically, he died by suicide in August of 2019, just one month after having released his first new music in a decade, under the new moniker Purple Mountains. A close listen to the self-titled album reveals a version of David Berman who was still very much struggling with his demons.
I had been planning on seeing Berman perform live for the first time later that summer. The news of his death shook me, as it did so many others. His impact was widespread, among fans and fellow musicians alike, and an outpouring of love and heartfelt condolence seemed to flow from every corner during the weeks to follow. In an article titled “David Berman Changed the Way So Many of Us See the World,” Mark Richardson writes:
It feels important to note that his lyrics, which seemed to be beamed in from another dimension, were used in service of songs that were generally sturdy and sounded good wherever they were needed.
Still, though, those words. Jazz critic Gary Giddins, writing about the work of Ornette Coleman, once noted ‘the music hits me in unprotected areas of the brain, areas that remain raw and impressionable,’ and Berman’s words functioned like that too. He had a gift for writing that, ironically, and in a very Berman-esque way, is hard to talk about. His use of language is so specific, it’s hard to find some of your own to describe it in a way that doesn’t diminish what you’re trying to convey. ‘The meaning of the world lies outside the world’ is how he put a related idea, in another context, in his song ‘People.’ But the way I’m describing it now makes it sound like something heady and tangled and complicated. It was the opposite. Berman had a knack for representing what was right in front of you in a way that made you see it as if for the first time.
I find myself relating to Richardson’s words, as I try to find the right words, to describe David Berman’s words. You’re better off just accessing his music directly. Even if Berman’s suffering was clearly expressed through his songs, he conveyed it in a tone that was both warm and oftentimes comical. There was a therapeutic lightness toward life’s difficulties that he wove into the fabric of his songs. It was a quality that I think genuinely helped a lot of people.
In another song touching on winter’s theme, “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” he writes the ghost of himself into the very song, allowing for visitors to gather round and warm themselves by the fire he creates:
Songs build little rooms in time And housed within the song’s design Is the ghost the host has left behind To greet and sweep the guest inside Stoke the fire and sing his lines
The song builds a room, presumably within a house, where the songwriter continues to live, and hosts whichever guest might appear with a need for warmth and companionship.
Berman wrote a book of poetry called Actual Air, originally released in 1999, but reissued in 2019, also just weeks before his death. As is the case with his songs, Berman’s witty insights about life, in all its wonder and bleakness, can be found in this brilliant collection of poems.
One of my favorites is “The Homeowner’s Prayer.” It’s a poem that considers the circular and linear nature of time. We move through the stages of life on a path toward our imminent demise, as the seasons continue to circle back around, obscuring the fact that one day they no longer will, at least not for us. And the time they take to come around seems to get ever faster as we get older. This is a sad poem about a man’s untaken opportunities and unlived experiences that are eventually lost to him. They were never really his to begin with because he did not live them. Time, as it were, passed him by.
But this poem reminds me that we ought to think of “home” as the people more so than the place. The title seemed incongruent to me at first, but maybe that is the prayer—let me value people above place. I have moved enough in my life to understand that my true home is the people I get to experience life with. Everything loses its flavor when you take away the people for whom you care about the most. We often confuse this simple truth in a modern society that confuses simple facts. What if, as a “homeowner,” the first thing that came to mind were the people who inhabit my heart, rather than the house I inhabit? Berman’s poem helps me to be mindful of the moments I get to spend with my people and to value the immaterial over the material.
I think David Berman knew that home was more than a place. He saw his own songs as a home, not just for him to live in, but also for any guest who would enter them to listen. Here is the poem in its entirety:
The Homeowner’s Prayer – by David Berman
The moment held two facets in his mind. The sound of lawns cut late in the evening and the memory of a push-up regimen he had abandoned.
It was Halloween.
An alumni newsletter lay on the hall table but he would not/could not read it, for his hands were the same emotional structures in 1987 as they had been in 1942.
Nothing had changed. He had retained his tendency to fall in love with supporting actresses renowned for their near miss with beauty
and coffee still caused the toy ideas he used to try out on the morning carpools, a sweeping reorganization of the company softball leagues, or how to remove algae from the windows of a houseboat.
He remembered a morning when the carpool had been discussing how they’d like to die. The best way to go.
He said, why are you talking about this. Just because everyone has died so far, doesn’t mean that we’re going to die.
But he had waited too long to speak. They were already in the parking garage. And now two of them had passed away.
It was Halloween.
Another Pennsylvania sunset backed down the local mountain
spraying the colors of a streetfighter’s face onto the narrative wallpaper of a boy’s bedroom.
Once he thought all he would ever need was a house with time and circumstance.
He slowly made his way into the kitchen and filled a bowl with apples and raisins.
The clock was learning to be 6:34.
The willows bent to within decimals of the lawn.
It was Halloween.
The years go round and round. Halloween just passed and soon it will again. The 52 weeks that make up a year bring us back to this same spot pretty quickly. Add up a life’s worth and you only get 4,000 weeks, on average. How will you spend the time?
Cover art from Jim O’Rourke’s 2002 concert in Japan, featuring an image of O’Rourke obscured and blended with Chapman’s original, much like his version of “Fast Car”
Last week’s newsletter started out with my post on contemplating blue. It wrapped up with an impromptu concert from Jim O’Rourke, featuring a 33-minute version of “Fast Car.” I wrote:
I’m a big Jeff Tweedy fan, and “I celebrate the guy’s entire catalog”—especially the Wilco albums from the early 2000s, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born. At the time they were recorded, Tweedy was collaborating heavily with the musician and multi-instrumentalist, Jim O’Rourke. It was O’Rourke who first introduced Jeff Tweedy to Glen Kotche, Wilco’s current drummer who has been with the band ever since YHF. The three of them even formed a side project called Loose Fur that put out a couple of albums during those years. I was recently listening to an episode of NPR’s New Music Fridayand learned about a 2002 impromptu concert that O’Rourke did in Japan. He was asked last minute to perform and had to piece together a set using borrowed instruments. I found a bootleg (if the Internet Archives site is down, you can still listen here) of the show, which closes with a beautiful cover of Tracy Chapman’s iconic song, “Fast Car,” one of my favorites. O’Rourke’s drone-infused and atmospheric version goes on for a whopping 33 minutes! In the days of streaming, it’s been a while since I’ve downloaded an album and had to go through the process of adding the files to my Mac’s music library and then transfer them to my phone via a USB cable. It was well worth it.
If ever you’re in need of some peace, I recommend kicking back and listening to the full set. You’ll be transported to another place, one where the mental noise inside your head begins to fade away.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the many ways technology helps people stay connected from a distance. I connect with people and places via music, so while living abroad, I’ll often stream The Current out of the Twin Cites or WXPR’s Northwoods Cafe out of Wisconsin’s northwoods. These are great ways for me to connect with the Midwest, a place I will always call home. I’m connecting to Grenada too, through music. Two great trends I’ve enjoyed about the music here: 1) popular songs that have been caribbeanized (think Simon & Garfunkel with steel drums), and 2) 80s/90s soft rock and R&B. There is a radio station here that I swear plays Luther Vandross at least 50% of the time. If you’d like to tune into Grenadian radio, I’m a big fan of Radio Garden (also an app), which allows you to stream radio stations from all over the world. You can explore the globe through an interface similar to that of Google Earth, each green dot representing a different radio station. This is how I discovered Interferencia IMER (Instituto Mexicano de la Radio), broadcasting out of Mexico City. I highly recommend it. They play a wonderfully eclectic mix of tunes. It was through Interferencia that I first learned about Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers being traded to the New York Jets. At the time I thought, “How appropriate is it for a Spanish teacher from Wisconsin to get big-time Wisconsin news from a Mexican radio station?”
I also wrote about the moon and how it connects us to one another across great distances.
Stepping out of a life that has become your normal is always a jolting experience. You almost instantly realize all the basic routines and rituals of day-to-day living that you’ve taken for granted. On a deeper level, you physically leave your people, your support network and the relationships that bring you meaning and significance.
One of Angie’s routines in Wausau was teaching yoga on Sunday mornings. So this past Sunday morning we did some yoga poolside, Angie instructing as the pair of us moved and found breath. Angie prompted to think of a word to serve as a mantra that would set the tone for the week. As I gazed out on the gorgeous Grenadian landscape before me, with its mountainous peaks and valleys, all I could think of was the song, “Lonesome Valley,” from the movie, O Brother, Where are Thou?. In low and rolling voices, The Fairfield Four sing:
You got to go to the lonesome valley You got to go there by yourself Nobody else can go for you You got to go there by yourself
This, of course, is a song about death. “Death”—maybe not the best choice for a mantra. But as we continued to do yoga the song’s refrain played out over and over again in my head: you got to go there by yourself. To be clear, I know that I’m not here by myself. I am married after all and I live with Angie in this new place. But the demands of medical school are intense, and the reality is that the past few weeks I’ve spent much of my time alone while Angie is in class or studying. And Grenada is, in fact, and island, the perfect symbol of how I’ve been feeling: isolated and alone.
But I embrace my solitude for the time its mine to bear.I think that being alone is especially beneficial during times like this when you need to adapt to an unfamiliar environment and new community of people. To be alone heightens your senses, allowing you to more acutely observe all that’s going on around you and inside of you. There’s less conversation filling your thoughts and fewer distractions vying for your attention. Solitude affords you the space you need to grow and acclimate. As an introvert, I benefit from my seasons of solitude and even look forward to them.
Music is a great friend to me when solitude loses its luster and fades to loneliness. I like how Jeff Tweedy describes this impact of music in his book, World Within a Song:
Almost all songs function in a way that consoles the listener with a brief but vital companionship. In essence taking the place of another human in the room—another consciousness filling the void of isolation. It’s a tender relationship regardless of a song’s musical nature. From the bleakest black metal to the sweetest pop confection. The power to embrace the lonely is always at the heart of the bargain.
Adjusting to a new life requires patience. Patience and faith that Angie and I will find our people here, and also meaningful moments with one another. Life gets so much more messy and beautiful when you occupy space with others in an intentional way. Real meaning, I believe, is created in community, when the barriers come down and you see people for who they are and they see you. At some point you need to take the risks and get in the game. Engage with life. As Lucy puts it, you need involvement.
Being alone and being in community both inspire growth in their own way. I know that next week is a new week and one that will bring a new mantra.
Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, is a helpful and honest guide for writing fiction. She pulls back the curtains to confirm what we all already know about writing. It’s hard! Lamott paints the writing process as one riddled with insecurity, self-doubt, and despair. But she does so with a light heart and a whole lot of humor.
Her chapter on jealousy stood out to me as one of the most insightful and one of the funniest. In it she describes a severe bout of jealousy she experienced when a less-skilled writer friend started to have a lot more success than her. She writes:
My therapist said that jealousy is a secondary emotion, that it is born out of feeling excluded and deprived, and that if I worked on those age-old feelings, I would probably break through the jealousy. (…) She said it was once again that business of comparing my insides to other people’s outsides. She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.
She goes on to detail the small pieces of advice that strung together a solution for her jealousy. I would summarize this string of advice as follows:
Show grace to yourself and others, knowing that we will all die someday
Practice mindfulness to get a little better day by day
Use humor to make negative feelings funny
Accept negative feelings and defuse their impact on you
Talk and write about your feelings
I’m a big believer in using strategies from Stoicism (see “7 Stoic Lessons on Living Life to Its Fullest“) and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) to overcome any negative emotion that is preventing you from experiencing more fulfillment in life. This is exactly the stuff Lamott used to move past her jealousy. After putting these strategies into practice, she was able to reach a point of compassion for herself and for her friend, with whom she graciously decided to part ways. She writes:
And finally I felt that my jealousy and I were strangely beautiful…
The very day I read this chapter I learned of another resolution to a conflict involving shades of jealousy. In early June, Charli XCX released her album, BRAT. On the song, “Girl, so confusing,” she addresses an unnamed artist and the struggles she experiences in their relationship. Immediately following the song’s release, many speculated that the artist she was referring to was Lorde. This was confirmed when just two weeks later, Charli XCX released a follow-up single, “The girl, so confusing version with lorde.” On the remix, Lorde actually has a verse in which she responds to Charli’s lyrics about their relationship. She responds, in part:
Well, honestly, I was speechless When I woke up to you voice note You told me how you’d been feeling Let’s work it out on the remix You’d always say, “Let’s go out” But then I’d cancel last minute I was so lost in my head And scared to be in the pictures ‘Cause for the last couple years I’ve been at war in my body I tried to starve myself thinner And then I gained all the weight back I was trapped in the hatred And your life seemed so awesome I never thought for a second My voice was in your head
This is still pop music. Such a public display of resolving conflict is going to promote the work of both artists, and as the song suggests, “make the internet go crazy.” But I hear the dialogue between Charli XCX and Lorde as being vulnerable and honest. The very act of putting your work out into the world makes you vulnerable. The song’s subject matter brings me back to what Lamott’s therapist told her about jealousy:
She said it was once again that business of comparing my insides to other people’s outsides.
I try to remind myself on a daily basis that everyone I encounter is experiencing some kind of suffering, even those who appear to be happy and successful. Often times their sufferings are internal and go unnoticed, maybe even to the closest of friends. Knowing this can help us all give one another a bit more grace, reconcile the conflicts that divide us, and ultimately, reach the potential that each of us carries.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Wenninger is an educator and writer. He teaches language and culture and writes about his thoughts and experiences here.
