As a teenager, I spent months drawing with nothing but Sharpie; my art teacher wanted me to get comfortable with not being able to erase. After contour and texture studies, we progressed to working with negative space—that is, defining an object by what's around it. 

I'm working on a song about someone who's not there, and as often happens, the lessons appeared right when I needed them.

Austin Kleon posted this gem about punk artists defining their work by negatives, with a nice quote from David Byrne on how the Talking Heads set out not to do certain things other bands had done. "The only sensible course was to avoid all of it, to strip everything back and see what was left. ...It was mathematics; when you subtract all that unwanted stuff from something, art or music, what do you have left?" Byrne adds that he later moved beyond that approach, "but the dogma provided a place to start."

In a Chicago rock discussion group, someone posted Paul Westerberg's interview with Musician, in which he discusses how artists define themselves in relation to others, whether they're aspiring to be in the in-group or to break away: "It takes a lot of courage to be different but it takes a great deal of hard work to be the same. I think in the end you get the same result but you've got to be what you are." (I've always had the impression that Westerberg had little choice about being different; he's constitutionally perverse. In Trouble Boys he says that if you tell him "White sheet rain," he'll come back with "Black blanket sun.")

What do those things mean for the song? for me as a person? Defining by absence is useful, but there's a point at which it becomes too reductive. What isn't starts to obscure what is and what can be. I was stuck on a refrain of "I won't think about you, I won't think about you" until I figured out that it needed to break so the song could become a whole song, not just an idea. Ultimately the no isn't enough; you need the yes too. Or I do. 

A few weeks ago, to general woe, Café Selmarie announced it would be closing. I've lived a block away for the past eleven years, and being able to wander through Giddings Plaza for a perfect croissant or a cup of veg chili has always been one of the best parts of the neighborhood.

Right after the announcement I took an evening walk down Lincoln. The windows of another restaurant were papered over. The urgent care clinic sent fluorescent light out of what used to be the Brauhaus. By the fountain a familiar cellist was playing a Bach melody I've learned by heart this year. It felt like an elegy for the Square as I have known it, for this whole stretch of my life.

We cling to the illusion of permanence because it provides the even more important illusion of security. Or that's what I told myself as the streetlights came on against a blue twilight.

I moved out last week. This blog is not the place to go into the details, but the past couple of years have been the hardest of my life. Sometimes the difficulty seemed permanent in a way that began to feel secure, which terrified me.

I've left behind the music room where we recorded most of Highway Gothic and a lot of Unswept tracks. The hundred-year-old piano from "Gen X" and "After All" is still in the front room. My sticky-note project is still on the wall; I will collect it at some point, but inevitably pieces will be shuffled and jumbled. It won't be the same. Nothing will. 

Bach is a good choice for an elegy. His music provides a sense of having tapped into a deeper natural order—and I still don't know whether it's an actual natural order or merely the comforting illusion of one, rendered exceptionally well. The cello suite dances on a sharp edge of paradox, offering permanence in a melody, something that vanishes even as you experience it. Perhaps that, in itself, is the natural order.