2019 in Review

In 2019 I was all over the place, so I’ve put (most of it) in one place. Some publications and otherwise…

I began New Year’s in Paradise, California, and Chico, where Justine Kurland and I went to do a story for Vogue with survivors of the Camp Fire and helpers around Butte County. We found ourselves in an apocalyptic landscape: “a burned car commercial, a molten American dream of oil and conquered country.” 

Later in January, in Texas, I protected a tiny dog against coyotes and wrote from a cabin where my other nearest neighbor was a rescued lion. Essentially I found myself living inside a short story, Captioning for the Blind, that I first published eleven years ago with paintings by Virginia Yount, anthologized in Best Nonrequired Reading 2009.

I flew back to New York and wrote this piece for Vogue about the activist and water protector Nathan Phillips, who was filmed singing the American Indian Movement song in an encounter that went viral. The last time I’d seen Nathan, he was speaking at Indigenous Peoples Day on Randall’s Island in New York and the time before that, I joined him and dozens of others in a four-day prayer walk he led at Standing Rock where a year before that, the camps of water protectors resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline had been forcefully evicted. (The prayer walk was photographed by Mitch Epstein, and some of the photographs are included in his book Sunshine Hotel and his exhibition Property Rights, and later in the year Mitch and I had a conversation for Aperture about this.)

“If Leonard Cohen had worked his own merch table, maybe he’d have become a therapist too.” Also in January, I profiled Sharon Van Etten for New York/Vulture around the release of her album Remind Me Tomorrow.

I’d first seen the name Mothers Against Meth Alliance spray-painted on a truck near the frontlines at Standing Rock. In February I went to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to write about Mama Julz, the water protector and activist who founded MAMA to fight the colonial effects of meth, missing and murdered indigenous women, and big oil. I didn’t expect to discover Julz in the midst of a blizzard, searching for her own teenage daughter. One of the hardest things I’ve had to do for a story was to meet a thirteen-year-old girl for the first time behind bars. My longform profile of Julz and her family, photographed by Taliesin Gilkes-Bower, was commissioned by the wonderful and sadly short-lived Topic.

Just after Townes Van Zandt’s birthday in March, I published this piece for The Guardian about the “perfect darkness” of his songs and the posthumously released record Sky Blue.  

For The Blue Muse, a 25th anniversary CD compilation of blues and traditional musicians working with the nonprofit Music Maker Relief Foundation, I wrote a liner notes essay about the direct current to a disappearing world, and about an encounter with Eddie Tigner, who would pass away later in 2019.

May 9 was deemed Sonic Youth Day over at Pitchfork, and I got to write this about one of my favorite albums of theirs, Sister.

I was at a Bikini Kill show when I got a text from my sister that Roky Erickson had died. Tobi Vail announced it onstage shortly after. Over the next several days I began calling around old friends and collaborators of Roky’s in Austin, and wrote this essay for Pitchfork’s Sunday Review about Never Say Goodbye, a lesser known album of the beautifully stark ballads he wrote while incarcerated for felony possesion of a joint at the Rusk Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

For Pitchfork, I also wrote about Prince: Originals, a posthumously released collection of his demos and for T, I wrote about the 40th anniversary edition of Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park, 1970s photographs of after-hours Tokyo voyeurs.

Over the summer I went to eastern Kentucky to profile Tyler Childers for The Guardian, had a great long talk with him about country music and rode around in the hills in his truck listening to his album Country Squire, coproduced by Sturgill Simpson (they’re touring together in 2020). “The problem with country is we’ve turned the props into the play,” Tyler told me.

On a sweltering day in July I visited the jazz pioneer, holistic artist, Bennington professor, acupuncturist, martial arts teacher and self-proclaimed investigator of the human heart Milford Graves in his global garden in Queens for HAOMA journal. (I’ve also been writing about Agnes Denes, Ana Mendieta, and Anne Brigman for HAOMA.)

My story Exploring the Nantucket of the Bronx, part of a longform series in collaboration with Chris Mottalini for Curbed NY, won a New York Press Club Award. We gave the plaque to Max, who is the heart of the block we profiled on City Island.

I wrote a story about Louis Armstrong’s house for Italian Vogue. For So It Goes, I interviewed the artist Bieke Depoorter about her photobook As it may be, in which she returned to Egypt to ask strangers to write responses to her pictures directly onto the photographs.

In August I gave a short talk about Penelope Spheeris’ film Suburbia at BAM. But halfway through the screening afterward, I felt a sudden impulse that I needed to leave. When I walked outside, my phone lit up with two words: David Berman. I had been relistening obsessively to Silver Jews records, and to an advance of his forthcoming Purple Mountains album; we were to do an interview and I was looking forward to arguing with him about Willie Nelson and agreeing about a lot of Johnny Paycheck and I was also, to be honest, nervous about confronting the ominous darkness that hovers over Purple Mountains. I also loved those songs. The next day, I was part of a group who read Berman’s words outside the workers’ entrance at the former Whitney, where David once guarded art. Permissionless Reading of the Work of David Berman was organized by Lance Bangs; I read parts from Phone Landscape with Eternity that drew tears, and later Lance and I read from Cassette Country: December Notes, which got laughs; and afterward the skies flushed, went electric, and poured open. Pink deli roses were passed around. The loss still feels gigantic.

For WSJ Men’s Fashion issue, I profiled the artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn ahead of his Gagosian debut, talking about his tremendously intuitive and expressionistic portraits of emotional memory, family abandonment and an artistic breakthrough, and how comedy manifests in his work.

With Joel Sternfeld, I went to Climate Week at the U.N., to witness the youth-led actions, the scientists processing the latest findings, and the rare leaders stepping up. Story published by Vogue.

On the day Daniel Johnston died, it was good to be able to see one of my favorite Texas musicians onstage. Andy Bothwell and I headed to see Willie Nelson perform at Forest Hills Stadium and later that week we recorded a podcast for Consequence of Sound/The Opus about Willie’s Red-Headed Stranger. (The essay I wrote about the album was originally published by Pitchfork here and last year I interviewed Willie on his tour bus for The Guardian here.)

This fall marked the 125th anniversary of the North Carolina School for the Deaf, where my father, uncle, and grandfather, all profoundly Deaf since birth, were students and where my parents met at work. For the October issue of Our State magazine, I wrote about the school’s history and evolution, and about my own family’s history of Deafness, American Sign Language, and family sign language, and I spoke with one of the first African American students to attend the school. (I also loved looking through the old photographs in the school museum’s archives, which should be a book of their own.)

Lots more photography. For Magnum Photos, I talked to Alessandra Sanguinetti about her project On the Sixth Day: “It was about paying attention to everyday animals...looking at them as if I was one of them.” For Bookforum, I wrote about the discovery of April Dawn Allison’s photographs. For Contact Sheet: LightWork Annual, I wrote an essay about Preston Gannaway’s ongoing project Remember Me, a long-term photographic exploration of memory, loss, and growing up in rural New Hampshire. And for T magazine, I interviewed the photographer Shannon Taggart about her book Séance, which is as much about the history of photography as it is about Spiritualism. With her own project, Taggart says, “I realized I wasn’t that interested in the true and false of it but in showing the psychological truth of the experiences I was encountering.”

I was surprised and honored to be a footnote in Prince's unfinished memoir, which quotes from a story Alec Soth and I made for Vogue about the houses where Prince lived. Prince: The Beautiful Ones is as bittersweet as you'd expect: part Ƭ̵'s own writings and photos, annotated (and with a wonderful essay) by Dan Piepenbring about their collaboration.

It’s been exciting to watch what Randy Kennedy’s been doing over at Ursula magazine in its first year and I was very happy to be enlisted for the new winter issue. With the help of Helen and Brice Marden, Gus Van Sant, Jack Whitten’s daughter Mirsini Amidon and wife Mary Staikos Whitten, R.H. Quaytman, Peter Nadin, Roger Carmona, and of course David and Georg Kremer, I tell the story of how a chemist from Germany (and the so-called “magic suitcase” that he brought to New York City) happened to have a profound and vivid influence on postwar art.

For the Criterion Collection, I wrote a piece about escape and coming of age and Bobby Womack's rendition of "California Dreamin'," which appears three times in Andrea Arnold's 2009 film Fish Tank.

For The New York Times (Arts and Letters Sunday edition) I wrote about the musician Jim Sullivan, who released just two albums before he vanished in the desert outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico, in 1975. Light in the Attic has been releasing those, but there’s much more to this story...stay tuned.

If you want to read me in Japanese, look for the latest issue of IMA, in which I have a piece titled Desire Lines, about Alec Soth’s road photographs. Starting in 2020, I’m also contributing a column entitled “Cosmic Fishing” to Alec’s zine masquerading as an irregularly published newsletter. Sign up for The Little Brown Mushroom Newsletter here.

Working with Carolyn Drake and her collaborators in Water Valley, Mississippi, I wrote a story that has a structural nod to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. An excerpt was published by Magnum; Carolyn’s photographs and this piece will be part of her book forthcoming in spring 2020 from TBW Books.

A story I wrote for Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures will be included in her May 2020 monograph from Aperture Books.

Many other 2020 projects and stories are still TK as we say and I can’t mention them just yet, but I can tell you that I’m also continuing to volunteer with the PEN America Prison Writing program and for the spring semester, I’m excited to be the Mina Hohenberg Darden Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA writing program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. As usual, I will be in many places, practically at once.