A Portal to Your Thoughts
Becoming more online in my 30s than I was in my 20s is not something I expected for myself. I was extremely online in my 20s, don’t get me wrong, but my life was grounded in IRL scenes. I had friends, and we did stuff together, and I ignored the internet for hours or days on end while we did. I haven’t done that very much in the @taalumot period.
There are, of course, many obvious offline reasons for that, chiefly kids. It is simply impossible to have as much fun as I used to. Everyone being equally online and stressed out during the COVID lockdown equalized that and provided me a social lifeline. As I ruminate endlessly on why being online is so much less fun now than it was a couple years ago, many explanations offer themselves, but none satisfies Occam’s razor better than that people are simply having fun offline again. I’d better start figuring out how to do that in this phase of my life.
I don’t just mean “having fun,” of course. I mean finding companionship and belonging and social support, and I don’t mean to make light of those needs by dismissing them as mere “fun.” But that’s not all I mean by calling it that. I have never really been able to have fun unless it was with real companions with whom I belonged. And that may be rare, judging by the trends I see reported online, but it’s the way my life has been, and it may explain why the things I write about life seem meaningful to people online.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on my 20s because the 10th anniversary of what was arguably their definitive project — my studio album, Portal — was last month. I was listening back to it recently — as I do fairly regularly because it’s one of the most healing practices I have available to me — and the chorus of track 4, “Blocks,” hit me particularly hard as a mission statement:
I built it out of blocks
it’s a portal to your thoughts
it’s a house with a living room
it’s an Earth with a silver moon
it’s a record with 11 tunes
and I wrote them just for you
to see what you will do
when you come through
This is why I do everything. It’s why the website you’re reading exists. It’s why I’ve been making stuff that has belonged to this project since 15 years before I knew what this project was, and why that stuff spans every creative medium I have ever been able to learn how to use. I make stuff because I want to find people who respond to it, so they can be my friends.
I have often become consumed by the popularity sickness to which creative people are prone, rooted in the (let’s be real) delusion that they could attract so many ✌️“friends”✌️ with their art that it could eventually become their dream job, because we all know how much we love doing things after our money becomes dependent on them, am I right? By that measure, I have rarely succeeded. But by the measure of real friendships, I have. Kind of wildly, in fact.
The story of how Portal got made is entirely about my friends. It was friends who put together the festival where it was conceived. It was a friend who recruited me and the woman who would eventually become my wife to play in the band whose entire existence crash-landed like a UFO at that festival. She and I crawled out of the wreckage together, and I started writing songs about what happened, all the strange encounters I had with friend after friend that night, and the twists and turns of my relationship with her. Then friends agreed to play and sing on this record, even ones from a long time ago who just so happened to be in town. They spent ungodly hours in the studio with me making it, and they contributed their own insane ideas to making the record something I could never have done alone.
Collaborative art-friendships are the entire reason I’ve had the experiences that allow me to identify as a musician at all. And crucially, the musical output of 10 years ago is hardly the point of the story. I ended up marrying that person from the band. Now our musical collaborations involve things like playing ritual music in a planetarium for our Jewish community, of which she is the founding rabbi. The art part allows me to align all of my practices in impossibly coherent ways, and that’s entirely thanks to the people the art brings together.
Last month, I was privileged to attend André 3000’s first hometown live show for his new flute-powered project, New Blue Sun. I went with my younger brother. It was a lifetime peak experience in both the artistic and religious categories. It was a ceremony of transformation in which our local hero, the best rapper in history, was gleefully requesting permission from his old-school hip-hop audience to play mind-shattering heart-opening free-jazz flute music, and we all enthusiastically said “yes” over and over again. Never have I bonded with an audience at a concert like that. I mean, I thought I had, but this was something new. The spirituality of this event was explicit. André was talking about it, the people next to me and I were talking about it, that’s what we were there for. Communal spiritual practice.
It’s possible that this whole time I’ve been saying “spirituality,” I may have actually meant “making psychedelic art with other people.” In my life, these have never been separable pursuits.
