I saw a baby jaywalking. I saw the most pregnant woman in the world jaywalking. I saw two kids jaywalking on their hands, a man jaywalking with a chair on his head. I saw cops jaywalking. I saw people on every mode of transport jayriding in every possible direction; a guy on a one wheel breaking a land speed record, a scooter, a bike, a double bike, a unicycle, a silver stallion. Where was Casey Neistat? I didn’t see him. But I saw a man jaywalk with his buttocks very out, wearing only angel wings and a golden cup on his nuts. I saw a nun jaywalking while smoking a joint. Weed was everywhere. People smoked cigarettes with joyful impunity, butts flicked hither and thither because The Floor is the Garbage. All the toilets are mostly broken. A middle-aged white woman two seats down from me used the word “fuck” more in a minute than I’ve used in a lifetime. Another middle-aged white woman broke into tears at the sight of Colin Jost, fanning herself saying omg omg omg like she was fourteen and the Paul McCartney had just appeared (he’d appear next week). I saw people yelling into cellphones, crying into cellphones, taxi drivers whispering in Hindi into cellphones like they were running an OnlyFans ASMR account for fans in Delhi. Make note: It’s illegal to walk your dog without taking a phone call here. I’ve seen a thousand people kissing, a million people hugging. Someone did human diarrhea in front of us as we walked near Washington Square Park. Here be Robert Frank’s old home and studio around the corner from CBGB, which is now a shop selling expensive suits. I saw the bald villain from A Princess Bride. He’s a tiny one! I watched him monologue in a small theater on the edge of (in the?) West Village for two hours and only “rested my eyes” a couple of times despite being jet-lagged out of my mind.
I went to a taping of SNL and here was what intrigued: Most of the audience is just friends and family. (We sat behind Matt Damon’s (family).) Good luck winning the ticket lotto. (If they’re out of seats and you’re a VIP, they shove you in Lorne’s office.) It’s run as a very tight ship — turns out TV broadcasting likes to be on time and things can run on time in America given the right incentives. (Dollarz.) Maddie Rice fuckin’ RIPS. Watching her play guitar and shred and solo with the vibes of a four-thousand-year-old Louisiana blues guitarist was my favorite part of the night. Her fingers are like genius spiders. Lots of commercials means there is far less show than you think, especially today in the bifurcated YouTube universe of watching clips where you don’t “feel” the commercials. We toured the set after the show. It’s all very tiny. Everything is ripped apart instantly by the set folks. Everyone is nice and all smiles trying to figure out who you are and if they should care; Kam Patterson dapped me like I was Elijah Wood. Big line to take a selfie on stage. The “celebrity infrastructure” is especially impressive. Time to go? Your handler escorts you through a series of security locks and down into the bowels of 30 Rock to a sea of Escalades in waiting, doors and trunks ajar. Everyone knows your name and issue forth lots of hellos and good jobs and all that, and then you’re whisked to the after-party, which doesn’t get going until after 2 a.m. Lorne Michaels just sits in his booth and when you leave at 4:30, he’s still just sitting there, flanked by John Hamm, people coming up and bowing like they’re visiting a popcorn-addicted pope. He clearly enjoys it. That this guy has done this for ~fifty years is a bit TV bananas. The scale of it, the slapping together of the show in (basically) two days, the dress rehearsal just hours before going live, the cutting of jokes in real time, the manic set production, the (mostly) nailing it all and then the mega gathering afterwards — there must have been three hundred people in the post-show restaurant — is, well, it’s something else. What a thing to have kept going. And you feel like this is the last of an era, the final scraps of what used to be (the norm?) for network TV. Goodbye whatever this was. Glad I got to see you once.
Hello from NYC. I’m Craig Mod and that was my first couple days.
It was the one year anniversary of the release of TBOT last week (oops: two weeks ago)! I felt the date whoosh by amidst my eight trillion todos. Thank you to everyone who has supported / bought / told people about this book in the last year. And to everyone who has dropped a review on Amazon or Goodreads or wherever the heck else you’re supposed to do that (avail to buy: amzn | bkshp).
I’m doing an event / reading in Asheville, NC at Malaprop’s Bookstore on Wednesday June 10. RSVP here! I am excited about this. I have a longstanding love for Malaprop’s and Asheville in general. I’ve been going there for some fifteen years but haven’t been in a long while. I started writing a book that was never published in Malaprop’s cafe in another era, so it’s nice to close that loop and show up with a finished book on the other side of many lived lives.
Hope to see you there if you’re nearby!
#What I’m Reading, Viewing, et cetera, bla bla bla
Just started reading American Rambler (bkshp | amzn), by Isaac Fitzgerald and am loving it. Saw him chat with Emily St. John Mandel at The Strand last week; what a gas, those two. And wow, the Strand’s rare books floor makes for such a good event space.
Watched the Lorne doc, of course. It was good. Wish I had seen it before going to the SNL taping for a bit more context. Again: End of an era human being.
I finished Solvej Balle’s fourth book in her Calculation of Volume series. Overall, enjoying this greatly, if for no other reason than how weird and dorky it is. BUT! This is the first time in reading it that I thought: Hmm, will this land? IV is mainly (70%?) a cascading rundown on a bunch of minor characters. The last couple of paragraphs have me hopeful though — ending with some new narrative thrust; excited to read V, which should be back to moving this (weird / frustrating / fascinating) story forward.
I plowed through Jaws Log, the book by Carl Gottlieb on the making of Jaws. Thank you to whoever recommended that to me. So good, a ripping read. The book further cements how utterly insane movies are / Hollywood is. It’s about the making Jaws (Gottlieb was the screenwriter rewriting / editing / cleaning up in real time on set, while also playing a small role), sure, but more about how movies are generally whacked together, ad hoc and chaos monkey style, last minute, huge team efforts, deadlines whooshing past at $50,000 a day.
Speaking of insane movies, I watched Obsession (2026; Curry Barker b. 1999 (!)) the other night. Holy crap. Read nothing about it and see it in a packed theater if you can. The jumps, the screams (of the audience) are worth it. It was one of the most stressful things I’ve maybe … ever?? … watched. Barker nailed it. It’s so well made, paced, acted. Inde Navarrette is terrifying. Weirdly, the movie looks like it takes place in the 90s? Or 2000s? Or maybe this is just some Gen Z fetish world of the past? (With smartphones.) Nobody has jobs? How old are these characters (emotionally, financially)? 15 or 28 or 36? Nothing in our world makes sense / has rhythm anymore, and perhaps we’re starting to see that reflected in media created by people born into these extremely fuzzy times.
I read [REDACTED]’s new book, which was a technically impressive lit-gem, but … left me cold at the end? Not dorky enough! One of the things I love about Balle’s CoV series is how unabashedly dorky it is while also being “literary” (“genre not genre” style). I don’t know, I just need more dorkdom in my life right now. Don’t you? I think we all do. The world feels desperate for dorkily deployed, committed craft. (Because: Nothing makes sense and the scale and speed of incoming change is going to drive us all insane if we can’t laugh / dork out.)
On the flip side: I enjoyed Ben Lerner’s new Transcription. A bit unexpected because he lives in my mind as A Very Serious Person, and as I just said, we need more dork. Reviews are going on and on that this is a novel “about smartphones,” but I saw it more as a book (“dented memoir” / everything is autofiction) about “presence” and “conversation,” language, perspectives. A compact, modern, low-stakes (no murder) Roshomon in Rhode Island. Also worth noting: The US cover is so much better than the UK cover, a rarity!
New York City: loud, mostly broken, and more dangerous than should be legally allowed. The whole city feels like a ball of needles and plutonium held together by duct tape and rope spinning in an out of control centrifuge. It is nuts, and every day I witness about a million things that are batshit insane. For example: People put their shoes (!!) up on coffee tables (!!!) here with an alarming frequency and / or lack of self-awareness and / or impunity despite how biohazardous that is. I’m looking at two people right now putting their shoes up on coffee tables, coffee tables that other things — like food and drinks — are placed on, or books and notebooks. Do people in New York not see what is on the ground?! The liquids and excretions, the leakage?! And they think that rubbing objects in contact with that leakage onto surfaces that we touch is fine manners?! You guys must have incredible gut biomes here.
In the past two weeks I’ve smelt smells that no human should ever smell, many times. Smells that linger (or with ghost notes that linger) in the nostrils for hours. I’ve seen abject suffering out in the open (though nothing on the scale of SF). The trains sort of work when they want. The roads are falling apart. Construction is “happening” but the disdain with which everyone seems to be working makes functional completion a miracle.
And yet! I’ve had more hilarious chats with randos in the last two weeks than I have in the last ten years of living in Japan. Everyone is hungry in a way you just don’t see many other places. Everyone. People are going for it, intensely, all around in all the ways. Sit in any park and behold: LOTS OF LIFE. People with giant books and dogs of all sizes and someone singing “Hallelujah” badly oh no wait now Radiohead’s “Creep” and fifteen languages being whispered and yelled and kids mixing with grandparents and some dickhead probably selling bitcoin to North Koreans while six delivery guys jet by on off-brand electric mopeds wearing WWII helmets and balaclavas carrying Basque cheesecake to orphans.
What I feel most potently here in NY is the sense that nobody cares about anyone else in the best possible way. Not callously (I’d argue there’s a lot of caring going on, actually), but simply: Do your thing however you want to do it, buddy. The corollary of that: becoming a gloriously anonymous nobody. Oh, to be a nobody. As overtourism crushes Japan, being a “nobody” is harder and harder. I feel like I’m constantly “making myself small” to minimize imposition. Meanwhile, in NY no one has asked me why I speak such good English, or has been amazed by my use of a fork, or asked me when I was “going home,” or told me immediately upon entering the shop that “NO TAX FREE.” Pluses and minuses, etc etc; but grateful to remember and feel some of these pluses (amidst many minuses), even if just for a short while.
I do find myself thinking again and again: Yes, perfect, clean public toilets in Tokyo, but what’s the trade? There’s always a trade.
I saw the Duchamp show and walked away once again thinking: It’s all about just making making making (the Lorne doc also hammers this home: Set a deadline and get the thing out! and then do it again and again and again and maybe fifty years later you’ll have an impressive corpus). Don’t overthink, be weird, be a dork, be committed, show up, do the work.
I caught the MONKEY crew at Kinokuniya next to Bryant Park; what a great event with readings and meditations on translation. Also: felt the crazy nostalgia of my Art Space Tokyo NYC launch way back in 2010, also at this Kinokuniya (though upstairs), also with Roland Kelts there from the MONKEY crew on our panel.
Today is the first day in twelve days when I haven’t had nonstop coffees / events / viewings / dinners from afternoon to night. I’ve been spending the early parts of the day writing at the Center for Fiction, which has been such a great resource. I wish we had a place like this in Tokyo — a bunch of folks silently bashing away at their manuscripts in minimal-eye-contact, maximal-sighing / writing-apnea solidarity.
This is also the first Roden I’m sending with my new mailing list software, Mailbot2000. I “rebuilt” Campaign Monitor to be more to my liking (using Listmonk as a base and then layering a bunch of custom interface on top of that). Let me know if anything funny is going on (there’s likely a lot of brokenness). “SP Correspondence Services” will be the From field going forward. Why do this? I was annoyed at paying $500/mo to Campaign Monitor and not feeling like I was getting that much value back. And because it didn’t work how I wanted it to work. And because we are in the Season of Change, as Sloan so succinctly puts it, and we can now quickly and efficiently make Home Cooked Software. If you are are a software company, your moat just shrank. You better bring it and bring it hard: Value and innovation. Or your users are going to home cook you to death. See also: Intuit.
Hope to see you in Asheville on June 10 (RSVP if you’re coming). And do let me know if any interesting NYC stuff is afoot. I’m mostly here until July.
Oh, also, I’m planning on reprinting the TBOT fine art edition; if you’d like to be explicitly notified early about that, sign up here.
