Audio Version Here

Noise. What a great word. It feels good to say and it’s metaphorically potent, technical and esoteric and material and grounded all at once. Noise is sensory, evoking a subject, an experience. It’s also elemental, baked into the objective fabric of the universe—the inevitable byproduct of every signal, the anti-matter of all information. Like the ocean, noise moves in waves. Sometimes it crests. Sometimes it crashes, terribly, upon the shores of our lives, of our ears. Of my life, of my ears.

There are noises that obliterate meaning, that make a mockery of sense. There is, for example, a pile driver outside my window, and has been for a while. If you’ve spoken to me in the last six months, I’ve probably complained to you about it. It’s bad. It’s so bad. That impossibly resonant peal of steel on steel, a knell rending the Earth (and my mind) steadily, rhythmically, for hours and days and weeks unending! O, God! Prithee, peace! I yield!

Yesterday, it stopped. Never has silence to me been so rich. John Cage could never.

Anyway! I’m a bit slow on this but thank you, dear friends who live and vote in New York City, for making my little heart happy and electing Mayor Mamdani last month. I don’t think it’s naïve to let myself feel some goddamn optimism about one goddamn thing for goddamn once, goddammit! And if it is, so what. I’m tired of being cynical. It’s better to be righteous, and to feel, and to be alive to the hope and the suffering and the beauty of life! The monsters will lose and the horrors will cease and the future will be ours! In this one specific instance, for a moment, at least.

Work Updates

I want to give a lil’ shout-out to director and friend of the newsletter Catalina Beltrán, who was kind enough to invite me onto a 29-hour devising-workshopping situation for a new play she directed in late November. We were offered the iD Studio Theater up in the Bronx to play and develop and show some work: Nancy, An Elegy in Three Parts, named after a person called Nancy and the bad stuff that happened to her and the complicated questions around the specific circumstances of what to do about it. I played the guy who did the bad stuff, and around whom the complicated questions were specifically circumstantial. I want to thank Cata, the theatre, and the whole incredible and generous cast of Francesca Santodomingo, Mónica Delgado, Andrés Nicolás Chaves, and Tony Macy-Pérez, for welcoming me into a space of such warm and rigorous exploration.

On the docket: A supporting part in Golgotha, a feature film directed by Chris Rosica and starring my pal Daniel Oakley (I’m playing his partner, we’re cops, it’s a spooky situation), shooting in January. This is adapted from a short we all did together last year and I will say it’s somewhat-to-very gratifying to have been kept around and to have had my role expanded. Moustache time approaches.

One Last Thing

I opened this year with a note appealing to those friends and colleagues of mine who are people of this country to, in so many words, do something. My perspective was, and continues to be, that participation is the foundation upon which fascism will be defeated. There are so many more of you than there are of them, whether “them” is MAGA voters, or ICE agents, or billionaires, or whatever. That imbalance means that it takes activating a mere fraction of the people who believe in, you know, rights and liberty, those vaunted tenets of American political culture, to form a countervailing force—even though our enemies putatively have more power. There are other kinds of power, and other ways to use it.

One year into this fucking shitshow, that idea does seem to have been internalized by a large enough portion of the American population that the mood, it feels to me, has changed. If in January things were at: “Oh god, oh fuck, oh no”, now they seem closer to: “Fuck you, make me.” Among the people, I should say.

Canal street. ICE tries to pull a raid. Hundreds of people show up, block the vans, turn them back. North Carolina, Border Patrol goons (awfully far from the border) try a big kidnapping operation, ignominiously flee after a few days of being chased into the forest by teenagers. Chicago. Minneapolis. Los Angeles. Whistles, neighbours, parents, friends. These are the scenes now, today, this is the situation. Things are still very scary and very bad and the list of problems grows apace, but we are no longer overmatched. We are going to win. And that’s without getting into all the recent electoral successes against fascism and the old ways of doing things.

So, if you are an American citizen and you voted for one of the good guys, if you supported an organization in the fight, if you volunteered or attended a protest or called your rep or joined an ICE watch or put your body on the line to protect your community, if you did something this year—thank you.

We have a world to win, and we will. Happy holidays, all.

Carl