Cascadia Calling, 2025.9.15
I’m writing this on the first truly fall-like day we’ve had in the Pacific Northwest. I got coffee at Black Arrow and walked through Belltown. Some dickhead was shattering the peace with a too-loud car driving up 1st and down 2nd over and over again. I have recently become radicalized in favor of congestion pricing and now think it should cost $20 to drive a car within one mile of Pike Place Market.
Otherwise, the city is starting to look and feel right again. The fires have subsided, and I’m hopeful that the rains will start to lash the coast and put an end to the smoke season for the year. Before long, the clouds and the bay will be the same color and the city can hibernate in a flannel cocoon all Winter.
If you like fuzzy bleep bloop music, I recommend the latest album by Patrick Cosmos. Future National Sports is a spacey, fuzzy journey that always feels like it’s on the verge of being an ambient record, but never quite settles down. It plays with structure and tone in ways that are too intricate to zone out to, but it makes for great walking-the-city or late night bus listening.
I have always had a fondness for, for lack of a more descriptive words, “noise” in my music. I like fuzz and discordance. I like sounds for the sake of sounds. Future National Sports has a surfeit of interesting noise. The opening track, “City of Glass” starts out sounding like it’s going to be a fairly pedestrian dark techno track, but then picks up, plays with, and discards a series of glitchy themes, before slowly coming apart at the seams. In that way, it’s a microcosm of the record itself. It’s a flighty album, alighting on several different moods and styles of fuzzy electronica. It’s a perfect album for soundtracking any trip through our modern dystopia.
I think my favorite track off the record is “FNS001”. It’s rhythmically interesting and has a throbbing, swaying cadence that gives an a pleasant forward motion. It’s a great, moody bit of dark ambience that doesn’t fall into the trap of being sludgy or repetitive.
“I said I’d stopped writing—to you now, and to anyone who asked in those days. What I meant was I’d stopped writing the way I knew how to write, what I recognized as writing, the way I had always written. Before it had been simple, if not easy: I sat at my desk and unstoppered my mind and waited until everything I had to say emptied onto the page, and then the writing was done. It felt good to do it. But this was different—I didn’t want to say anything about The Subjects, anything at all. And yet, I had to write poems; poetry paid my rent.
I tried many ways to outrun what there was to say, to shove it down, to go around. But poems are cleverer than the people who write them. And your Subjects—like light, like water, in your hands—ultimately find an opening and slip through.”
—Leila Chatti, “On Not Writing, and Letting Wildness Be Your Guide”
I was struck by Leila Chatti’s recent piece in LitHub. I keep coming back to her invocation of the Subjects and her use of constraints as a kind of remedy. When I picked up writing again about a year ago (after having not written anything for myself in over a decade), it was partially motivated by certain works I wanted to create, but also by my own set of subjects. The death of my friend Rocky. My mother’s stroke. The descent of the US Empire into febrile madness.
Many of the worst, least satisfying things I have written have been because I wrote them under constraints that didn’t suit me. Often, these constraints were subconscious or, at least, unspoken. Many times, I didn’t even choose them, per se, but adopted them because I failed to recognize them. I wrote stilted, pedantic garbage because I felt the need for some abstract rigor. I danced around the soul of stories because I didn’t know if I was allowed to tell them. I abandoned articles because I couldn’t make my words about art as powerful as the art itself. None of these were constraints that served me.
Not only is Chatti’s piece a touching and beautifully rendered vision of part of her life and art, it’s also a call to choose the constraints of our art with care.