there's a vid going around of him doing a song hours before the accident about how everything that's to be done has been tried & has failed. things only get sorted with time. 

not that i'm a fanboy about it, but the frames' sixth album caught me at a unique moment some twenty years ago & i played the wheels off of it. and then there was the film once, of course. 

elbow & glen hansard both represented this u.k. positive masculinity i hadn't known, voices that faced very real travesties of the world and warded them off with bigger, undying love. guy garvey is more graceful about it, more reflective and at peace when the rain has settled. glen sang from inside the storm. 

when i think about an outlet like pitchfork doling middling scores to his work over the years, it reminds me that criticism has such little bearing on how the sheer force of heart manifests in the physical world. 

maybe that's why i haven't written much in a while and have spent more time in the streets of the communal arts of late. it seems like that's where hope is supposed to be found, and i come across it sometimes. 

i don't know, though. there seemed to me to be a workmanlike hope in what i knew of glen's music, but to hear his mellow disappointment in that video got to me. he used to remind me that we had all the time in the world to get it right. now, he reminds me how little of time the world actually has for us. 

not even legendary political minds of the civil rights movement who moved the needle substantially for a better world seems to have found solace in their progress. they disavowed much of their optimism late in life...if they even got to live so long. 

i question if the moral universe has an arc at all.

is there still any hope for this sinking boat? maybe, but slowly it falls, under our feet and the weight of the ocean, a slow, unyielding collapse. you'd think i'd do something about it, but the urgency - i felt it in a late man's heartwrenching voice years ago - is gone.

pictured: "overdraft dinner with glen hansard ii" (2026), jarvix, ink+marker on paper