the eve before my birthday I get really mellow off two glasses of white wine in the countryside, the crickets are chirping, the sun has set but the sky is still a perfect faint pastel blue into yellow gradient. For dinner we made five different salads so we could have a gemischter salat and I had little perfect slices of beef tongue preserved in gelatin. I have so many dreams of being here, right here, in the countryside, that it feels like a reverie to just be here, smell the air, drink the cleanest water I have possibly ever tasted, eyelids heavy, feeling dead and alive at the same time.

I’m so glad July has come and gone. Shooting the movie in Vienna and curating a festival kind of hit me all at once, and I was feverish with exhaustion from shooting all through the night and then working through the day, then doing the same thing over and over again. Every day on set J is so glamorous, directing the movie, with her Diet Coke in a small skinny can, quilted leather Chanel flip flops and jeans that fit her perfectly. I am sick with a fever or the on-set cold all weekend but miraculously recover really quickly. Quickly enough to be able to really enjoy the festival Sunday at Karlskirche, Martin Klein singing on his keyboard, my favorite kind of concert. Then at 3am, the production van picks me up wordlessly from my apartment, my fingers hurt from teaching myself Velvet Underground songs on the guitar, I finish shooting at 2pm on Monday after having been awake for thirty-some hours.

I want to not be an absolute downer about July. Shooting the movie in Italy was kind of lovely; all these little sights in the streets of Chioggia imprinted upon me between takes: white cotton bra and panties, white terrycloth towels hanging from the wood shuttered windows, a bead curtain made from wine corks and rope, duct tape holding up the wheel cover of a car. Then there was the first heatwave which I kind of enjoyed because everything felt paralyzed, with my eyes half lidded I could hear the pool filter and the sound of my boyfriends father snoring and his mother making me an espresso over ice and it felt like I wanted to be alive forever, no awake forever, awake forever today because I wanted everything to be like today forever, today with the wafts of chlorine in the air.

Wish I were always in the countryside, where everything is so languid, so sublime, even though today at the swimming pool I was ruthlessly murdering wasps after being stung while reading I Used to be Charming by Eve Babitz, a gleeful cacophony of shrieking children playing in their designated pool. Long, arduous laps whilst looking at the cloudless sky, the fir needle trees with their skinny trunks. On the phone with my best friend Y who’s on an absolute disaster of a holiday, joylessly telling me all the trepidations I’d had about her holiday were coming true; but it’s not a good thing to know I was right, because I very much want her to have a good time. I can’t wait for her to come to Vienna. Everyone’s gone over my birthday, kind of, my closest friends are. Last year on my birthday at Engländer it was also somebody’s wake; when Y gave the waiter a sparkly candle to put on a tiny birthday cake he told us unfortunately we weren’t allowed to light it, the wake had requested no celebrations today.

By the time I finish this it’s late August, I’ve spent most of the month giving myself turpentine poisoning in my apartment finishing up paintings for September 5 show at Galerie Petra Seiser, wallowing in self-pity with my silly foot injury, languishing at the pool at Y’s house.

J and T and L arranged a little birthday dinner now that they’re back from Nashville and it was really sweet, played with the custom dominos O gifted me. I guess now the month is almost all over; it feels like the heatwave has broken and the weather is crisp. I’m aboard the train, the air tepid yet pleasant, en route to Berlin via Munich and we’re delayed because of an accident in Meidling, but I know what it really means. Suicide mile, they call the thin strip of rail between the city and outskirts, where the distance between the tracks widens just enough for trains to gather ample velocity.

In it, I am where most of the dreams that really mean anything to me are. The little house my mother lives in, in the alps. Where I would spend my childhood summers. A house my grandparents, father, great-uncles, uncles built for my mother father and myself. For our little family of three. My grandfather’s wood carvings are still etched on the ceiling’s beams. In my dreams, the house is not so little. My family is intact. My parents never divorced, my mother never had cancer. My grandparents are not dead. Their sheep are still on the hill. There is a sudden third floor to the house. An attic, with high vaulted ceilings, and an extra kitchen. There’s so much room up here now, we could just all move here I say to them. The day ends, I lie down in the new room with a mattress on the floor, I have a nightmare coupled with sleep paralysis. The sleep paralysis is unfortunately real too. I keep calling out for my father, and he says he’s right there beside me, and not to worry.

I wake up alone, in my apartment, sobbing. Pathetic, I think to myself, stupid and pathetic to let my parents’ separation which happened when I was an adult, affect me like this. Pathetic and stupid. A pathetic and stupid way to start my pathetic and stupid day.

Determined to fight against my stupid and pathetic day, I put on black capris and a thin black hooded sweatshirt and leave the house, sending off whatever I’ve sold this week, feeling nauseous, buying two bananas and some blackberries, I know I will at some point during the day have to eat before I go off to to the TV interview even though I cannot muster the thought of anything right now.

Back in my apartment I turn on my little solar powered radio set to Radio Klassik Stephansdom, Nicholas Harnoncourt directing the Chamber Orchestra of New York. I want to throw myself on my couch but there are two guitars on it and I have no willpower to move them. Instead, I separate all my black laundry, put it in the washing machine, make my bed, brew coffee in the bialetti, drink it over ice, sit down at laptop, work.

It was raining buckets and freezing when I finally meet J Wednesday late last month, a few weeks shy of us flying to Chioggia to shoot her movie. I’m wearing black leather boots, a black lace slip skirt, a black Brandy Melville boat neck long sleeve and my camelhair coat; a cruel trick for June. My hair is damp. She’s late, I’m waiting for her outside, my headphones half in, absentmindedly smoking a cigarette while I wait for a table. A professor from the art school I used to study at sees me, and I talk to her. She congratulated me on getting my degree, and then asks me why I dropped out of art school, and I hint at that I didn’t so much drop out as was kind of ghosted by my professor. She tells me to tell one of his colleagues, that maybe this specific colleague can help. Are you in good standing with her? the professor trying to help me asks. I nod, but I really don’t know. I don’t know if she ever liked me, or also felt indifferent towards me. Eerily enough, she appears at this same restaurant just twenty minutes later, and I nod and smile at her and she smiles back, and I am paralyzed, of fucking course I’m not going to talk to her while she’s out privately, having dinner with somebody much like I am having dinner with somebody. And I realize that I, out of sheer embarrassment, feel as though I’ve left it all too long and am just scared, scared of initiating contact and potentially being denied being able to finish so I’d just rather stay in this purgatory, where nothing was really ever addressed, much left unspoken.

When J arrives she tells me this is the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other. I tell her I was in the U.S. for the better part of last year, months on end, and she says, I do have a penchant for the dramatic, don’t I? She wishes that it was 2022 again, everything was better then. It wasn’t. She’s mad at L and T for turning 25. Why? I ask her. They still have everything ahead of them. I feel like I’m running out of time, she answers. You’re not, I push back, but realize maybe I feel like I am, too.

I am getting eerily good at saying no. No to going for drinks after the shoot when my call time was 5:55am. Having a little pep talk with myself before I enter any interaction, get in, get out, be agreeable, agreeable, agreeable. Sunny disposition. Blank canvas.

The other week in Paris, shooting my music video that the CNC funded that I could otherwise never afford to shoot, there is a heatwave. The air is acrid, stagnant, frangipanic, electric, charged with something I can’t quite identify. At the end of every shoot day, I bike 9.3km from the studio in Ivry sur Seine back to the Square Monthon. Everyone’s out, the city is so alive, biking like their life means nothing to them, coagulating next to the Seine or wherever there’s a terrace. Stark contrast to what it feels like back home.

Back in Vienna, I feel like I am stuck in this city, like an insect preserved in amber resin. Scampi fossilized trivially. Languid mood. Buried alive. Not entirely unpleasant. Wafts of chlorine in the air from the pool my legs are submerged in. Vali Export walking that damn man like a dog. Pippilotti Rist smashing in the cars with that damn umbrella. Like duct tape holding up the wheel cover of a car. Like white cotton pointelle bra and panties drying out of a window. And just like that, against my wishes, the novelty of summer wore off.

I arrive in Guangzhou after one international and one domestic flight, one iced black coffee down, I come to smoking a blue-tipped Chinese cigarette outside our hotel, flashing an unnecessarily winsome smile at the little delivery robots bringing purchases nestled inside their chest cavities to the rooms. I watched Magnolia on my incoming flight and wonder if this was a mistake.

I am having somewhat of an existential crisis, but what I don’t know yet is that towards the tail end of my trip, food poisoned by a potentially dirty beer can drunken at the foothills of a sunset hike in Guilin, I would be Gregor Samsa-ing my way through the remainder of this journey in Shanghai so in hindsight, I had it kind of good in Guangzhou without realizing it.

It’s not a full blown Elliott Smith level crisis, I’m not Seymour in A Perfect Day for Bananafish just yet. It’s not like I don’t delight in things. I delight at miniature cucumbers, quartered lengthwise and laid to rest on a bed of crushed ice on an elevated plate. I delight at trying on a five hundred American dollar qipao made of green and pink silk that I have no intent of buying at the New World Mall. It is very long and loose on me. The woman trying to sell it to me notices me pinning it with my hands then types into her Baidu translator and shows me her screen, “Too tight clothing makes people look cheap.” I delight in buying one that’s shorter and more fitted instead, blue and white silk, for two hundred yuan, off a street vendor that’s also selling Mao’s Little Red Book. I buy it without trying it on. I delight in feeling alone all the time, even when everyone is around. I delight in the interview with a local publication that takes place in my hotel room, bestowing me in my very own Lost in Translation moment when the cameraman says something lengthy to the magazine correspondent, who in turn just tells me to speak faster. I delight in a crisp white John Galt baby tee I acquire multiples of at the Brandy Melville Shanghai. I delight in drinking Chinese electrolyte drinks, my favorite so far being the original flavored Scream. I delight in reading Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon all over the Yangshuo countryside despite the heat and humidity melting the spine’s glue so I have to snap a rubber band around it when I put it down, to not lose the pages that fall out after I read and subsequently turn them.

I remain coated with a ridiculous biofilm of unease, unable to shake it despite swimming laps or getting a sunburn or watching the impressionistic play of lights and music on the Li River. I can’t lie on my left side at night, I feel my heart beating so hard in my chest. I am forced to fall asleep lying on my back which makes me feel like Samsa after he turns into that damn beetle and nobody knows what’s really wrong. Yes, all of this is exacerbated and then put into relativity by my stupid food poisoning. I try to explain what’s wrong but my mouth feels full of marbles. I am feeling wan, and awfully sorry for myself. I wake up drenched in sweat multiple times every night.

Somewhere over the Caspian sea, seat reclined to sleep, mummified in my dirty grey hoodie, Closer playing on the screen, I feel somewhat normal again. I’m re-reading Generation X after having just talked about Douglas Coupland and I’m reminded of the future I thought I would have when I read this book first, teenaged and dewy with anticipation — it wasn’t some clear vision or anything, it was just sheer excitement at the unimaginable fact of ever growing up, and now it feels like none of that has really happened; like I am stunted or disillusioned, preoccupied with whatever.

My fourth album’s being announced next month and what I should technically feel excited about has just left me a little anxious at the prospects of it all. I can’t wait for summer and warmer temperatures, maybe all my problems will be fixed by then. Maybe they won’t. Whatever!

PS. My new single, Cowboy Mouth, is a month old! Have you listened yet?

Here’s kind of the super short of what’s happened this year so far. The last time I wrote digitally in my iPhone Notes app the entry begins with “I was so sleep deprived and sore from working out and also re-tiling my kitchen floor” and the first two are still true but my kitchen floor is re-tiled and my apartment has never been more zen and I have never been more in a battle with myself in terms of productivity. I have been mercilessly chasing some type of zen all year. Apartment devoid of any airs or anything that has ever troubled me. Still must paint floors in guest bedroom. The weather was a blissful 18-20 degrees celsius a few weeks ago and my joie de vivre soared only to come crashing down with the temperatures and staying in bed watching countless movies, Maps to the Stars, Being John Malkovich, Match Point, Stranger Than Fiction, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and so on.

The year began in Vienna, bitter freezing cold, fucking Nabokov cold, and shortly thereafter I headed to the Netherlands, Groeningen, for an awards ceremony for the MME award. It was the first time I’d ever won a music prize, and it felt a little bizarre to think about it (especially given the fact that I’d had an entire press day telling everyone I’d been nominated for several awards but never won, so why should this time be any different), so disillusioned, so Thomas Bernhard Holzfällen — which I read this year too, highly enjoyable, and a few weeks later went to the Burgtheater with Ofczarek reading excerpts from it (also highly enjoyable). After winning the award I did some press in Vienna about it, but it really sunk in when I went to the ORF, Austrian’s national public broadcaster, for the TV interview. Right after my win my father texted me “but it changes nothing right”, and ultimately, a few months later, nothing really has, except the arbitrary knowledge that I feel somewhat like a winner this year, and I didn’t start off the year by losing, yet again.

I rented a temporary atelier in the 6th district and have been painting again, except it’s open plan and I get shy and it’s right around the corner from dead ex-boyfriend’s apartment which I hadn’t anticipated on troubling me — and it doesn’t really — but I don’t really choose on which days I end up feeling tinged with nostalgia and hurt, and then also it’s been freezing in there; but Patti Smith would tough it out, Helen Frankenthaler would tough it out, I think to myself as I stand in the atelier’s little courtyard smoking cigarettes with my dirty hands.

Went to Venice for a friend’s birthday, Venice is so unequivocally for lovers, I don’t make the rules. I fell in love with the city all over again, I hadn’t been in ten years. If only I could always be sat in the parlor drinking Negronis with olive brine in them, ice rattling away in the highball precariously, relinquishing in an intermission from the Viennese cold that rattles me to my bones. Back in Vienna, I performed at the annual Ball of Sciences this year where I played at 1AM for twenty-five minutes, the audience roaringly jovial. I wore my only real ballgown, a mottled ivory silk bias cut with rusting metal buckles on its twisted straps; an actual costume from an opera that I bought a few years ago at the Volkstheater’s sporadically announced flea market. Yori wore a white silk dress her mother had made and looked like a little angel right out of Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits with her long blonde hair. I’d stupidly imagined earlier in the day that I’d be playing the upstairs salon which was a little more traditional and had a jazz band but instead I was in the absolute dancefloor of it all; just myself and my violin and my SP404 and I was almost glad I’d left the piano at home because this wouldn’t have gone down Billy Joel style like acoustic at the piano in Berlin at Chateau Royal mid December; my other last solo gig save for a store opening last week. Then somewhere in between that it was the Berlinale; stayed at my favorite hotel but in a room I’d never stayed in before; annual Chanel Berlinale dinner. Lots of cold punctuated by more cold.

My last band show was in Paris on the 27th & 28th of February, two blissful nights at Le Grand Rex as Belle & Sebastian’s opening act, for which I will remain forever grateful to Duglas Stewart from the BMX Bandits for putting my name forward. My friends all came down, my boyfriend was there, his parents, my manager, and Madeleine, whom I’d went to high school with who was entirely responsible for introducing me to them took the Eurostar from London to see us, and we caught up briefly after, outside. It was the time of my life; the whole band are such wonderful performers. After my show every night I snuck into the audience through the theater’s stage right door and sang along to every single song.

I’m freshly showered and have washed my hair for the first time in days. I put on a sheet mask my mother’s Korean friend sent her in a care package from Korea that she is iffy about me delving into though I want to try it all at once and give the skin on my face “stewardess syndrome” or whatever it’s called when you apply too many different products at once. I’m wearing purple plaid cotton panties from when I was in high school, navy wool ribbed Ralph Lauren knee high socks, a thin heather grey cashmere quarter zip turtleneck and black fleece lined ski leggings to go for a walk in the snow.

My boyfriend gave me an Epiphone Coronet guitar for Christmas and it surprised me by being so light. It being light means I can actually play while standing up without being annoyed at the weight of the guitar, and I don’t think I’ve ever picked up an instrument that felt as enjoyable, maybe when I played the same Hoefner bass that Air used for Moon Safari on the outskirts of Paris.

Somewhere online I read that there’s nothing worse about musicians talking a lot and being self deprecating on stage. I wonder if I fell victim to this on tour during my concerts this summer. I am just not afflicted with a desire to remain mysterious in a fabricated sort of way. I think about this when I see other artists and when I have negative or condescending thoughts about them which is frustrating, and I’m not supposed to have them, ultimately of course I’m an anarchist enough to think everybody should just get to do what they want; yet I am just so critical, hypercritical and too self aware but perhaps not in a constructive way.

Sometimes I see photographs of myself, too concerned with how I am being perceived, and think about the fact that I never fill in my brows and maybe I have plucked them too thin. On shoots makeup artists are always trying to draw on my eyebrows and it annoys me in a kind of groucho marx way; my eyebrows were never super thick and I feel like when they are filled in (something I am guilty of doing all throughout my teenage years) it throws off the balance in my already asymmetrical face. Sometimes I see photographs of myself and I think yes it’s all happening, whatever it may be. Now I am lying down on mother is taking a photograph of me lying down on the couch with my boyfriend’s family’s dog and it’s my last night here and I immediately feel guilty for not wanting my photograph taken but luckily I haven’t said anything I’ve just been smiling so I get to just feel guilty for my thoughts.

December was interspersed with lots of strange interactions. My most recent ex keeps texting me; wishing me happy holidays. It’s now been 8 months since I have broken up with him. The other week I arrived to flowers sent by him, a regular occurrence, that he then apologizes for via text, texts I never reply to and have not replied to for months. It was mildly amusing at first, a bit sad to bear witness to, but by now I find it cloying and creepy. I also have had no contact with him; it being a one sided scenario has made it impossible to even be civil because I am invariably so weirded out by this. In that same week, my ex boyfriend from when I was 19, the one I was engaged to, sent me one of those U.S. made pelican ash trays I’d had in my old Echo Park bungalow. The ones where their metal beaks are parted enough to place your cigarette into. I used to spend so much time in that tiny little ant infested bungalow apartment, on the only non steep part of Baxter Street, nestled just underneath Elysian Park. It was tame most nights even if I had to park the rusting Oldsmobile Delta 88 too many blocks away, and in the morning I’d walk to the corner to get an americano and a cucumber cream cheese bagel and listen to him on the phone, in London, at the end of his day. When he came to see me in LA we’d drive out to Palm Springs in his convertible Jeep, which he’d bought because he’d read about it in Glamorama, a book he later confessed to solely having read because I was reading it and he’d wanted to impress me. In Palm Springs, stoned one day at an antique mall, I’d bought the ashtray. In one of my transatlantic moves I’d lost it, or maybe he’d lied to me and secretly pilfered it after me breaking up with him, I don’t know. I don’t know why he sent a replacement after all these years. He said he found it on eBay accidentally, but I wonder how do you find this very specific item unless you’re deliberately searching. He’s recently engaged again, according to an Instagram story.

Late at night now. Big discogs.com order. Blithely ordering books. Boyfriend orders us two copies of Thomas Bernhards Holzfällen - Eine Erregung (1984) so we can read it together.

When I go to my email inbox to check on my new purchases, I recieve a newsletter from Sugared + Bronzed Silverlake. Last year in March when I was living in Los Angeles at my old roommate’s while he was in Japan, I stole a brazilian wax on Sunset. It wasn’t even a fucking wax, it was sugaring, an ordeal that to me is far more aggravating than something just being ripped off you in one fell swoop. I didn’t even really mean to not pay, not like when I deliberately keep walking with something frivolous in my hand; but rather my US card kept declining on ApplePay and I was wallet-less; so I told the wide-eyed receptionist who invariably didn’t care if I lived or died that I’d try and pick up cash or go get my wallet from my car. It was only a small fable; I hadn’t arrived by car and my wallet was somewhere buried in a strewn pile of clothes in my Lincoln Heights sublet, and I suppose I had vague intentions of finding a liquor store ATM. It wasn’t until I found myself stranded in that godforsaken weird strip mall with the globalized Scandi aesthetic that houses the D.S. & Durga when I realized I wasn’t going to turn back, I wasn’t going to look back, and I was never going back to pay for my bill at Sugared + Bronzed.

Back in Vienna. I’m sitting at the Wien Mitte mall making a stupid little tincture of recent purchases from the Reformhaus — iodine water and bitter greens, while sitting on one of the few benches dispersed seemingly at random, yet somehow placed in the perfect trajectory to be caught in the crossfire of passerby sneezes. This mall architecture is so hostile, no room for loitering, and I think to myself that the only people patronizing the few seating options are absolute derelict freaks, and then I wonder if I, too, am a derelict freak. I used to come here all the time with my best friend when she was still my best friend back when we used to get recklessly high together. There is an older couple opposite me, in what appear to be their 80s, who look to be absolutely normal and docile, which momentarily relieves me, until I realize they are drinking Smirnoff Ice out of cans at 11am.

I am, unsurprisingly enough, continuing my two day binge read of every single Girl Insides entry. Earlier this month I had a nonspecific craving for something I couldn’t place, something I wanted to consume, one that was only absolved by me talking out loud to myself; consuming my own voice and thoughts while performing the menial Sisyphean tasks that govern my life. I am reading Girl Insides in every free minute that my day allows me to. I am jealous of her anonymity. I do not post here with nearly as much candor but I really wish I could. I wonder if would feel cathartic to just purge all my asinine thoughts and also my impure ones; imagining it would feel like absolution in the best way; just how I like it, publicly and with attention, two things I have made my entirely livelihood dependent on. Thinking in my head to myself like she writes This is my life this is my life this is my life. Reading her entries reminds me of some of the best things I’ve read; a mixture of Douglas Coupland and Eve Babitz, with a lot of what it was like on my favorite website LiveJournal back in 2006 and maybe some random short story I find in an old 90s Paris Review, or also the best part of that one Ottessa Mosfegh story about a young man named Tyler who lives in Los Angeles with his landlord he has a precautious relationship with and every time he uses her phone he can smell halitosis on her receiver.

I’m signing off for the year now, Yori and I are meeting at what I like to call the communist bookstore which is really just a subterranean room with a dirt floor and lots of dog-eared books. It’s pay as you wish which is great in essence, but also means I am constantly probably overpaying, pouring all my coins and crumpled bills into the ceramic pot meant for discreet donations. This summer I went to see a film there and we sat on a sticky bench and I chain smoked cigarettes and joined the post-film discussion with a voracity I’d normally only reserved for school, unencumbered and shameless. I remember having to pee crouched outside between two cars during the movie because there was no bathroom and the next public toilet was in a park that felt too far away. I remember it was an usually satisfying sensation to crouch between the cars on this hot summer evening, the air thick and fragrant, and smell the metal on the front bumpers of the cars I was in between. When I was describing the communist bookstore to my boyfriend I told him I didn’t understand how the communist bookstore is so unknown and isn’t universally in Vienna considered the epicenter of cool. It’s not even really a communist bookstore, maybe anarchist, but either way I am fiending to get out of the mall, and fiending for a perhaps mangled edition of Andrea Dworkin.

Also had wonderful cab ride on the way to the communist bookstore. We dodge the busy street by the opera to avoid tourists but end up on a far busier and more congested road. My cab driver turns to me and says “in Turkey we’d say, ‘sometimes we get caught in a hailstorm when trying to avoid the rain’, you know?”

“Also it’s important that it feels aesthetically cohesive,” my record label’s general manager says on a Google Meet that consists of myself, my manager, the label’s general manager, the label’s project manager assigned to me, and the UK label head. He says it casually, right before we all sign off, almost as a footnote. It sits with me for the entire week; and I find myself still consumed by it now. Is the implicature that I have not been cohesive? Or that there is a desire for is an immediately visually recognizable brand, which somehow I am failing at?

This is exactly the kind of expression I find myself hyperfixating on simply because I don’t know fully what it means. I have, within the constraints of my horizon, been aesthetically cohesive to myself, faithfully, in fact. I don’t fucking know if it’s been cohesive in general, fuck, I am living in immense post-modernity, what am I going to do, confine myself?

I’ve been moody and insolent all over central Europe lately, at a chemistry read in Berlin I found myself having not no chemistry but rather negative chemistry with an actor who’s in a scene I’m barely in anyway, but the project is so dear to me that I felt oddly defensive over it, and unfortunately it showed as was told to me the next day.

Things are always kind of written across my face; not necessarily in a plaintive way. My boyfriend tells me I look so beautiful when I wake up barefaced, so I wore no make-up (read: no under eye concealer or lip liner or blush) to dinner with friends, and everyone asked me if I was tired.

My irritation may or may not have had something to do with the fact that I accidentally gave up smoking up until this weekend, after having run out of my favorite type of cigarette in a specific package (Vogue Lilas in the original square box) but has since been rectified upon visiting Berlin (Germany sells Vogue Lilas with a recessed filter like an original Parliament, France only sells the recessed filters for the slightly stronger L’essentielle variety). My boyfriend brought me back Chinese cigarettes that have a dark blue filter that leaves a faintly sweet familiar taste on my lips, reminiscent of licking a manila envelope.

This weekend, on Saturday the 13th of December, on the day before what would have been her 79th birthday, the city of Paris paid tribute to Jane Birkin by naming a footbridge over the Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondisement after her. My friend Mateo texts me live updates.

A few days ago it was also classical violinist Maria Dueñas’ birthday. It was all over the Deutsche Grammophon instagram page. It made me think of earlier this summer, when I was carrying home Jasmin and Enzo’s one year old, who had fallen asleep in my arms, and we walked past the Deutsche Grammophon CD case display window on Seilerstätte. Enzo asked me if I’d ever considered going down that route. Maybe if I hadn’t smoked pot in high school, I too could be Maria Dueñas, we joke.

I don’t really know what I want for Christmas but here’s what I desire when I scroll TikTok. I want to hold hands with an otter in a body of water. I want to eat freeze dried lime Jell-O that I saw a girl with PICA eating as one of her “safe foods” on an account run by her mom because it looks and hears exactly like what I imagine biting into chalk would be like. I would also eat the Mazzy Star yogurt bowl (the swan is made of shredded coconut). I want to drink a banana milk latte, even though I am typically averse to milk or sugar in my coffee. I want to never see a “it’s very important you listen” video again. I want to only see fan edits of Gregory Peck as an Irish Catholic priest, and I want a pet deer like Audrey Hepburn’s Pippin.

My favorite Christmas movies for you, in chronological order:

1. Metropolitan (1990)

2. Die Hard (1988)

3. Charade (1963)

4. Less Than Zero (1988) or American Psycho (2000) yes I get to put them as a tie since they’re both Bret Easton Ellis novels

5. Fanny and Alexander (1982)

6. Salon Kitty (1976)

In the lobby of my plastic surgeon’s office this morning, while waiting for him to administer my baby botox to my forehead (mostly migraine related) I delight wildly over his advent wreath. He says his assistant made it for him. I call my best friend immediately after to discuss, it makes me feel engaged and excited, like this could be the best piece of contemporary art I’ve seen all year — the assistant used a real implant to mold the candles herself. We discuss the colors she chose for both the breast and areola, and enjoy the coupling thereof with the more traditional, muted remainder of decor, contrasting with natural, edible items (dried orange slices, cinnamon sticks).

I get the same feeling later at the bodega around the corner from my apartment. There are little baby Jesus figurines, shrink wrapped in plastic, lying on real grass, on a cardboard manger.

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I began writing this from Paris where I was for a week and some change, where I spent a lot of time feeling very Zooey Glass, cigarette balancing precipitously on the edge of the bathtub, anything evocative I say lost on most of who is on the receiving end of whatever I am doling out, manuscript wet, fingers pruned from being submerged in the water for far too long. Mouth pallid and tragic, wrists small; insolent. Loved seeing my friends whom I always miss dearly, shot a music video, spent some time in the Palais Royal gardens, on uncharacteristically windy for July days, talking to Jay Alansky (who had reached out to me after I covered the song he wrote for Lio, Sage Comme Une Image), and we discussed the notion of being understood. The haunting conviction that I won’t be grasped, and never fully will be, has never been more prevalent, and the thought of that frightens me to an (sorry but quickly must paraphrase Alex Turner’s rumored love letter) “unfamiliar degree”.

Finally managing to finish this, however, esconced in the comfort of a rickety bamboo chair on the pavilion in the Alps, overlooking the largest freestanding mountain in the whole Alpine range, newly returned from the swimming pool in the forest, hair wet and stuck to the nape of my neck, Vogue freshly lit, cicadas relentless, the brook leading into the river Enns babbling as brooks are wont to do, sockless, one black Serafino Mancinelli deerskin loafer on, the other dangling, heel subject to being mosquito bitten. I escaped Vienna after two weeks, the prettiest city in the world yet if I stay too long I feel as though I am being entombed alive in a gilded sarcophagus— my apartment, where I seem to have lain myself to rest with all my worldly possessions. I’m knee-high in the scalding water that is my fourth album, occupied with all sorts of frivolous questions such as: do I even exist outside the pastures of the cognoscenti? I find myself raking in the charity chips like a croupier— enough to sustain my life yet forever aware that I could collapse both before and if the ordinary public were to ever read and reward me. I’m feeling sentimental, partially because of the necessary emotional accouchement required of me to finish this record, and also in part because my birthday is coming up, which, much like my age, has been rendered useless, since despite feeling so seasoned sometimes it appears I remain at heart (and to some extent physically) vulnerably young, as though youth were a chemical solution in which I find myself permanently incarcerated (it’s because I’m so pure and my disposition’s so goddamn sunny, okay?)

Stopping this drivel, because this probably isn’t what you’re here for. What has been going on professionally? For everyone not at the absolute uttermost edge of their seats about my internal battle (this whole entry was really giving honey we have Karl Ove Knausgaard/Anais Nin hellscape at home, fuck) I have had a single come out with Rebounder, “Tennis Bracelet”, and a new song called “AUTO” forthcoming on August 27th, the music video edit of which I am currently taking a break from to finish writing this.

What have I been reading? Tom Crewe’s The Fete published in the current issue of my favorite literary journal was the most devastating array of words I’ve read in a very long time (and that’s saying a lot given the book mentioned earlier that I enjoyed an inexplicable amount), I just want one person in my life that’s read both that and J.D. Salinger’s Teddy, but I suppose that is far too vast of an ask. Answered Prayers by Truman Capote (also brilliant, haunting, and you will find I have generously borrowed from if you’ve read both this entry and that book), and then on the train to the alps I just finished the French to English translation of A Woman’s Despair by Jay Alansky.

Spending more and more time around the theme of my new album realizing I do it to myself, I do, and that’s what really hurts (Thom Yorke singing “Just” by Radiohead voice), but really that’s all it’s ever boiled down to, and truthfully I fear I better very quickly come to terms with that. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing everything wrong, sometimes I feel like I’m doing everything right, but the truth is perennially more insipid and prosaic than that, fucking listless at best — some far more tepid middle ground that I too will choose to imbue with the utmost importance. For it should precisely be triviality that one should oblige to, and that I find myself consistently inspired by when seeing others do the same, like Josef Dabernig’s Rock the Void (mumok 2014), Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch Whether Line (Fondazione Prada 2019), Alex Da Corte’s Slow Graffiti (Secession 2017).

This was a mess of an entry, but to quote Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, “if some aficionado of my mess says, ‘that’s not like you’ the better”.

PS. “Europe” tour (mostly Germany) is coming up soon, are you coming?

Somewhere around the midway mark when we hit Atlanta I absolutely lost it after we’d played the show. Merch had left me feeling quite emotional (I burst into tears after I found out how long somebody had traveled to see me, to which they became teary too), and another lovely fan said that “in her head, I was just so much more famous”, to which I naturally replied, me too.

Responsible for my chimp out wasn’t just the no lunch, no dinner, two stage vodka sodas but the sheer frustration of the post-show pipeline of fast food joint to budget hotel. I have never more aggressively needed to break out of a loop. I distinctly remember absolutely begging the boys to take me out for a real drink. My favorite is a very dirty (dirty with any kind of brine, honestly, olive preferable but a pickle martini has rocked my world before or a red cabbage martini that I’ve sadly only ever seen on the menu at Cafe Mogador), and very wet (an obvious amount of vermouth please!) vodka martini.

We ended up at a bar in Atlanta that took way more coercing to get inside than it should have (they should have been chomping at the bit to have us in there!) but at least inside I could smoke Vogues and have 1 dirty martini (really all it took for me to end up hitting the fold in the backseat of our Ford Transit).

Other notable nights include Milwaukee, where someone brought a hefty (at least 40, could have easily been 100 if I’d had anything to do with it) stack of 8x10 glossy photographs of myself to the show and asked me to sign every one (which I did obligingly, with absolute pleasure), Columbus hang with Dylan and Noah’s very cool grandmother, or Washington D.C., where due to a private party rental our initial venue (Pearl Street Warehouse) relocated us to Union Stage. There I have never been more blithely aware on this tour that I cannot sell out a room of that capacity (absolutely debased myself on stage that night talking to the audience, couldn’t have been more candid if I tried, both hands on the mic type beat), but it was fun and cathartic in a way because it allowed me to be so much more personable with an audience that I wouldn’t have otherwise dared to.

My favorite show in terms of crowd response easily, of course, as always, has been New York City, where someone yelled out “you’re perfect” to which my absolutely genuine unfiltered kneejerk reaction was to reply on the microphone, as the last syllable was still leaving the audience member’s mouth, “yes, I know, I think the same of myself”.

My during-the-day in NYC pre-show was nice too, I saw my dear friend Shanae and we had Sant Amb spaghetti and I bought a sheer ruffled miniskirt of my dreams at Agent Provocateur and got some Louboutins because much like if I didn’t have a dirty martini in Atlanta, if I had to wear the same MNZ or Rendl miniskirt with a tank top on stage (me most nights because it was just so hot and it was the literal outfit I’d been driving in all day), I was going to absolutely lose it.

I had originally started writing this to you from the road but everything always gets the better of me, and I wanted to be able to parse this in a way that I wasn’t leaving anything out, but of course I have and of course that’s an impossible task. I wish I could be on tour forever, despite it being a little bit hellish sometimes, but hellish in a good way, like halfway through you’ll be able to stop at one of the warmest and most deserted lakes you will ever swim in. Also, I say that, yet it is only from the confines of my own apartment, which affords me all the luxuries I am afflicted with, that I am able to finish this for you properly. I wish I could just tell you everything all the time but I save that for a small handwritten diary I carry with me, and it’s littered with souvenirs from wherever we’ve been.

Every day of the week on tour feels like a Thursday night, sometimes a Friday if it’s good. Mostly, we ended up playing beginning of the week shows. Monday night in Chicago was easily the best Monday night of my life, without a shadow of a doubt. I keep telling myself, maybe this doesn’t have to end? Please can I keep doing this forever, relentlessly? There is nothing I have been more cut out for. How much longer can I keep asking myself the same questions over and over again? “What did you wish for?” people ask when I blow away an eyelash; out a candle. The same thing, always, every wish I make, I’m always wishing for the same thing.

n.b. being asked whilst taking pictures of my legs “how many times can you take the same picture?” endlessly, forever, next question.

I put down many an hour behind the wheel which is one of the best activities I can think of, also I’m European enough to enjoy driving through the Americas in a Stephanie in a Douglas Coupland’s Shampoo Planet kind of way, it’s still novel to her, she’s finally stolen away with Tyler, she’s smoking cigarettes and playing her French cassettes, Chanel Rouge Noir on her toes (she just like me fr), legs on the dash, knowing she’s on her way to Hollywood. My brain tunes out, all I am doing actively is listening to music and making sure I am keeping a safe distance between our sprinter and the cars around me. Maybe I’m going a little fast, but that’s all, I’m fast, never reckless. This is definitely 100% just my perception of how I drive. When we were at dinner dissecting our driving styles it seems that I am considered a little fast and loose behind the wheel.

Sometimes I wonder about the milestones in people’s lives, and I have this incessant realization that my milestones seem so removed from other’s people’s ideals. I don’t even mean this in the way that I am lofty or that my milestones are lofty, just in that I am relatively dauntless when it really comes down to the scope of my imagination. There’s always a gap that I am trying to bridge, the gap between what I have and what I want. Yes, I am so aware of my objet petit a, it widens exponentially as it is wont to do — it’s never really enough. If we’re really getting Lacanian with it (psyche consists of stages or “registers” as he calls them 1. Imaginary, 2. Symbolic, 3. Real) — I have observed in the people whose relationships with their desires I respect: they have good management between their Imaginary and Real. I spend a lot of time in the Symbolic, which I am constantly reconstructing from the Imaginary, and probably not a whole lot of time in the Real. Or if I’m in the Real, I’m imbuing it with the Symbolic to make it align with my Imaginary. I like Lacan because for him, the relationship to the self is forever a hunt. The infant entering the lifelong quest for the Ideal-I, etc. Performing, on stage, making music is that for me. Perhaps also because it’s the oldest and most inherent thing to me I’ve known. Whatever!

When I was a little girl I visited my dad’s office for the first time after we’d moved to Seattle. It was raining, and my breath fogged up the backseat window and I would write my name, in cursive, in it with my finger. There were large Douglas firs lining the serpentine drive up to the smoked teal mirrored glass paneled building. Inside, I was struck by a quintessentially 90s poster on the wall of a frog choking a bird while it was being eaten by it, does anyone remember that? It was captioned with the phrase “never give up”.

I have to admit it feels a little insane to be an indie artist driving cross country through the Americas while we’re arguably in the throes of WW III, and truly puts into perspective how Sisyphean my life feels sometimes; yet on the other hand I should be so grateful to be able to wake up every morning and roll that boulder up the hill because I have a boulder, and I have a hill (at current present at least).

By the time I get around to finishing this I am now in Milwaukee, six shows deep, post cold shower, negligee on, glasses on, in a hotel room I’m sharing with the two brothers in my band (Dylan and Noah Chenfeld), in a brief moment where everyone has left the room (Noah is looking at art, Dylan is eating a chicken bowl I got him in the lobby and phoning his mom), and I’m trying to write this whilst drinking an unsweetened peach ice tea and Myle-ing furiously away because I can’t possibly light up a Vogue in a shared hotel room. My MacBook is covered in black Hermes eyeliner that I put into my bag without its cap. My bag is littered with petty meal buyout cash. I’m no longer alone now. There are three men watching me write this.

Yesterday was the most grueling part of the tour, we woke up at 4am to catch at 6am flight to Chicago where we picked up the sprinter that is going to be our last mode of transportation until the tour wraps up July 3rd in Montreal. I’ve been doing a fair bit of driving in it (loudly, Vogue dangling out the window, my new record on full blast) but only to places like the laundromat where I spent the better part of my morning.

I wish I could say nobody prepares you for this but nobody does, if that makes any sense. My friends think I’m doing wildly glamorous activities on tour but really it’s a lot of early travel, long drives, line check no soundcheck, and shows on Mondays and Tuesdays which I assumed would be the worst days of the week but they haven’t been, they’ve been some of the best nights on the tour so far.

I oscillate between having the actual best time of my life and simultaneously undergoing extreme ordeals such as checking in 15 pieces of oddly shaped luggage (merchandise and instruments). I am too middling and unknown to really be afforded any semblance of luxury on tour which is fine, I keep telling myself this is all worth it and very rock n roll and character building. Is this the exciting piece of writing you hoped to see on here, that I’m not sure of. Did this need to be a post? Probably not, but here we are.

My favorite parts of tour are: seeing Rebounder opening up for me every night (they may actually be my favorite band at this point), playing my own shows, selling merch afterwards (70% because I get to talk to you and 30% because that’s probably the only time I’m able to make some money back), hanging with the boys, smoking cigarettes whilst driving, hitting the pool if the hotel has one (2/5 so far did). Least favorites: early travel times, people asking my ethnicity, the mic feedbacking, worrying if I’ve lost my Minky (a small, oblong bonbon pillow that doubles as a stuffed animal) or my diary anywhere I can’t recover them from.

Earlier this week I was copyediting my dear friend Sayori Radda’s interview of filmmaker and photographer Anton Corbijn (who recently just showed at the Kunsthalle here in Vienna). The interview took place on their shared birthday — his 70th, and respectively, her 33rd. Through doing this, I learned various fragments of Corbijn’s life and career which I found thrilling, such as him having David Bowie’s accidental death mask — produced for an Arcade Fire music video Corbijn directed; made because Bowie was too sick to make the trip in person, and he ended up sending what would end up being the last cast of his face. It makes me think, which of my photographs on my camera roll could be that for me, what screenshot of a FaceTime call, which selfie will have been my accidental death mask?

Anyway, what significantly resonated with me was a sentiment Corbijn shared in his closing answers, regarding a prize he’d been nominated for and lost. Now, I know I’m just a girl who loves relating everything back to myself and taking everything personally, and so on (Zizek voice) — call me Edmund Husserl the way I originate all meaning from the self and constitute all otherness by the self — but as someone that has several nominations under their belt and only one win (my music won an advertising award, so not even an actual music award) — yes, I’m fully aware they’re arbitrary for the most part — it just hit home. Corbijn ends it with “it’s just nice to have them, to be acknowledged, and they do help you fund art”. The jury told him they liked him a lot, but gave the prize to someone they felt could benefit from it better. I feel like I fall into neither category (jury favorite or crowd favorite). Yet they undeniably hold some significance, simply for the reason Corbijn mentioned, even if people who have won them love to tell you they don’t.

Corbijn also managed to talk about himself in a very deferential sort of way, which I respect. Or maybe he’s just 70 and so locked in with his self at this point. In music, I increasingly notice people seemingly very concerned with “sound” and how one has to “find it”, and it has to be this uniform, singular language, that exists throughout an entirety of an artist’s career, and so on. I find this trite, tiresome, limiting, and whatever, I’m just like having fun, ♪I’m just a showgirl that likes bikinis, blow up my life like German New Guinea♫. I end up more concerned with the a specific tone on an actual song. Yet maybe that’s the musical equivalent of Freud’s oral phase or whatever, and I’m just developmentally stunted. For when faced with having to describe myself, my sound, I just find myself telling the same old story over and over again, that I’ve been playing violin since I was three years old, I studied at the Conservatory of Vienna as a teenager, my trajectory with music professionally outside of classical began when I accepted an internship and then a subsequent full time position at Stones Throw Records with 19, etc. (The full bio is one online search away.) An answer that isn’t particularly satisfying to say, and the more I have to repeat myself, the more I begin to feel like Jude Law in I Heart Huckabees.

me playing Carnegie hall in 2001, my teenage university student ID at the Konservatorium

I just wonder how many more times I will have to talk about my life. My life, my origin story or whatever, these things will not change. Yes, I can choose to revise and copyedit my own history per se, but there are a few facts will always remain the same, unless I choose completely lie (which invariably, as only child that skipped a grade, I was no stranger to doing in my precocious, pre-pubescent years, and I discovered it to be not a very joyous — at least not in the long-term — past-time). I spent the last six years of my life studying philosophy amongst other things (I did a triple BEd in Philosophy, Psychology and English) and it’s left an indelible mark on me. Six years spent on manifold theories of the self and yet none have really made me wiser.

I find myself jealous, not in a despotic way but in a rather sad, self-pitying kind of way (far worse if you ask me, so pathetic!) of people who seem to have historically always had their “thing” and are doing it, whereas I seem to, throughout my life, just try everything out on a whim*, which yes, has gotten me this far, but where am I?

*I don’t think you can really claim whimsical unless you really are at the mercy of your every whim and desire. I am, and yes, it has put me in many a precarious situation.

Music has been the only constant, yet it’s taken on so many forms. It’s been with me my whole life but in such disparate, often contradictory settings. Perhaps it’s time to turn to a more deconstructive approach, defer meaning, Derrida-style or whatever, full anarcho mode, not only accept but reconcile myself with my objet petit a.

It’s also fun to find motifs in your life that exist outside of yourself, like rewatching a movie with some significant time apart (for me lately it was Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth at the Metrograph last week or the James Dean statue at the Griffith Park Observatory in LA). If anyone’s made it this far I’d love to hear yours.

Myself in LA at 23, a photo I took of the James Dean statue on that same roll of film; followed by myself at the same statue at 33.

Signing off by letting you know I’m currently nominated for best pop album at the 2025 Libera Awards, taking place at Gotham Hall on June 9th.

Wish me luck!

PS. America tour starts on June 11th! Will you be coming?

I guess in order for me to write here with any semblance of integrity I’m going to have to pretend it is LiveJournal circa 2006-8. I miss what the internet used to be, in a do you remember where you were when you first went online? kind of way. Everyone had their own website — my own domain, sofie.info, was an 11th birthday present from my engineer parents. This, on the other hand, ostensibly feels like the only avenue left for me to add to the plethora of online platforms I am wildly underperforming on as a musician.

Select interests, select friends. Enter the email addresses of people you know so you can invite them to subscribe to your newsletter. A few years into my old job they had me do this too; boilerroom.tv/sofies-mailout-001. It’s a decade later yet somehow I find myself unable to escape this obligation, and I suppose this isn’t really my first rodeo, though it’s the first on my own terms (and likely less palatable, again, refer to last sentence of prior paragraph). As I was typing this one of the artists I had mentioned in that newsletter just sent me the below, so I guess here we are, 10 years later, whilst my music is playing somewhere in a Californian CVS.

I downloaded Telegram the other week, the covert messaging service, so I could message covertly. The app, so starved for new users, sent out an automated message to every single contact in my phonebook that uses it too, to inform them that I’ve joined, may I note, without notifying me of this or allowing me to opt out. It led to a lot of people I hadn’t spoken to in a long time reaching out to me, a freakish amount — enough to leave me asking, what the fuck did this automated message say? Please message me immediately, even if we haven’t spoken in forever, because I explicitly downloaded this app solely to get in contact with you?

This here, on the other hand, is explicitly, specifically, deliberately for you! Literally just so we can, like, totally be in touch. And totally not at all so my website meets the requirements (webshop, upcoming tour dates, newsletter) of an arts grant I so desperately need — Donald Judd bought the penthouse, I get the pennies to fund tiny portions of my indie music career with, you get my newsletter.

My hopefully thrilling newsletter, wherein which I will be telling you things like, that for the better part of this year, I have been living out of two suitcases.

I spent February on the Czech border, crying my eyes out on command, shooting a horror film directed by one of Michael Haneke’s last students, Jasmin Baumgartner (who also directed my music videos for Klein-Marx and I Forget). It’s about twelve solipsistic reality TV stars competing for a cryptocurrency prize. I portray a wannabe actress who’s never been in anything and hopes that the show will be her big break — much like I hope for the film to be my big break, etc.

March I was briefly in NYC to play at Night Club, before embarking on a several show per day run in Austin, Texas for SXSW; and then I did a brief stint in my former second hometown of Los Angeles to produce music, figure things out, and renew my driver’s license. At the end of the month I also played my very first Vienna headline show ever, at my favorite jazz club, Porgy & Bess.

May feels like the January of spring (kind of long, kind of the worst), but it feels like I’ve stopped my life from totally derailing, so at least there’s that. I’ve also been part of a few projects that have come out this month: I have four songs on Eli Keszler’s self-titled third record & two on Jeansboy’s second album.

Maybe I’ll see you on tour this summer in America with Rebounder (pictured below), or all across Europe for festivals from now until early fall. Tickets & dates are on my website. Or maybe I’ll just see you right here, straight in your inbox, Sofie Royer 4 u.