October 13, 2022

I have joined the staff of Frontier, a design studio in Toronto, as Media Director and editor of Frontier Magazine. The position formalizes a relationship I’ve enjoyed for years and I’m looking forward to building its media business and returning, after four years working independently, to office life.

After having not traveled to the States since late 2019, since June I have visited four times: twice to Cleveland, for work on and the opening celebration of FRONT 2022, and once to Detroit, Chicago, and Madison, for a family trip; and once to Pittsburgh, to celebrate my birthday by seeing Earth and attending art events. I was surprised by how many emotions visiting Chicago, and the neighborhood where I grew up in particular, brought out of me. Though my boys are too young to particularly care, I was glad to show them my childhood home, my elementary school … my version of the places that now structure their lives.

FRONT offered some wonderful artistic experiences. My highlights include Jace Clayton’s 40 Part Part (which may travel to the New York Philharmonic); Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis’s Five Hundred Twenty-Four, Jumana Manna’s Wild Relatives, and Cory Arcangel’s Hail Mary.

In my last update, I recommended a bunch of albums, and I continue foraging for new experimental music. Some recently released favorites include Final’s It Comes to Us All, Kali Malone’s Living Torch, Mat Ball’s Amplified Guitar, Rhodri Davies’s DWA DNI, and Salamanda’s ashbalkum. Despite my trips, travel opportunities still feel limited, so I appreciate that these artists’ records not only expand my mind, but also allow me to imaginatively enter diverse places: Ball is in Montreal; Malone is an American in Stockholm; Salamanda live in Korea; Davies and Justin K. Broderick are in England.

Partly on account of travel, my recent reading has been mostly articles, not books. I really enjoyed Merve Emre’s profile of Australian writer Gerald Murnane, which opens with a kind of homage to his style; Verlyn Klinkenborg’s review of two new books about forest conservation that contains his typically beautiful landscape writing; and Fintan O’Toole’s short essay on Dublin and Ulysses, which brings together history, monuments, literature, and memoir.