2022, a few more things to add to the list

In the summer, I performed a disco wedding ceremony for Landis and Freda. It was a wonderful celebration of love and art and joy and the Baltimore I came to be a part of. I love performing weddings.
“I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight,” Linda & Richard Thompson
Celebrated 20 years in Baltimore, the greatest city in America. The longest I’ve lived anywhere. Best bet I ever placed.
Golden Palominos. Sinead O’Connor. Mona Demone. Raven Chacon. Nan & the One Night Stands.
A few more people I really admire, who have been quite influential to me, followed me on Twitter. I’m going to miss Twitter when it collapses. It had become the social media platform I preferred by far, and its loss is yet another thing I’ve been grieving. I haven’t closed my account yet, and I’ll likely be riding it to the bitter end.
Throughout 2022 I made a daily practice of posting to Twitter (and then to my Mastodon account) the title and artist of the first song that I heard that day. Some days it was a song I chose deliberately, others it was just whatever I encountered in the wild. I maintained a playlist on Spotify to keep track of it all. Over the years I’ve attempted various daily social media projects, and while part of that project is social media engagement, the primary purpose for me has been about discipline. Doing something like that every day is not as easy as one might think. The days when I was too sad and misanthropic and despairing to want to poke my head out into the world? Posting the song of the day became a (self-imposed) burden on days like that. When I was up for the engagement, though, it was great. Other people joined in sometimes, which led to more musical discoveries. I turned one of my mutuals on to Joan Armatrading, for instance. I considered continuing but the truth of the matter is that I would be better served trying to write here every day this year, and as I evolve the way I work with this blog and renegotiate my relationship with social media across all platforms, I’ll figure out a way to share what I’m listening to.
Speaking of which, Radio Plastique.
And speaking of resurrections of cultural outlets, Baltimore Beat.
I finally started listening to podcasts again after taking a several years long hiatus, largely prompted by the fact that I couldn’t find a podcast app that worked for me, and the increasing glut of podcasts available became a real turnoff. But Kristen turned me on to I Saw What You Did, a movie podcast that hits all the right tones for me.
I even took a little bit of a hiatus from being on podcasts in 2022 — I did only one episode of The Projection Booth about the film Little Orphan Dusty, which happens to be the first John Holmes film I’ve ever watched in its entirety, and which features a cameo from a very young Spalding Gray. I’ve got myself signed up to do quite a few episodes of The Projection Booth this year. No spoilers; you’ll have to wait and see when the time comes.
Over the past couple of years I’ve become convinced that adulthood and/or home ownership is mostly about trying to maintain control of how, when, and where water flows through your house. Just before Thanksgiving, I discovered a clogged drain issue that quickly became a larger problem, and of course it took longer to resolve that issue than I would have liked thanks to the holi-delays, which meant that the two weeks or so that it took to fix the problem were excruciatingly long. And damp.
Wonder Woman. Better Things. The Muppet Show. Somebody Somewhere. Abbott Elementary. White Lotus. The Rehearsal and Nathan for You. Under the Banner of Heaven. Hacks. Larry Sanders. Fleishman is in Trouble.
Didn’t love Severance as much as others did, but it gave me the John Turturro/Christopher Walken forbidden romance I never knew I wanted.
I made passing mention of this before, but it’s become clear to me that one of the most important things I did this year was to spent two full days recording at Magpie Cage with J. Robbins, where I recorded demos of 40 songs. I plan to release an EP or two from this batch in the coming months. Dealing with the home clog made me realize how this process was also about clearing a clog — pouring out my backlog of unrecorded songs (and all of their attached emotions) has made room for inspiration and motivation. The creative clog I have lived with since my thesis project was derailed really manifested as a sort of physical constipation, complete with indigestion and bloating. This is the year I feed Metamucil to my art. On to 2023.