Alexander
H. Krinsky

It's been some time since I wrote an article for jambands.com, coming up on nearly six months. For a few years there, I wrote at least four pieces a day for the website — not including what was shared on Relix.com, on socials or published in the physical magazine. But given the nature of the music and the scene that I so closely covered I feel that silence and distance was needed both for myself as a writer and an audiophile.

Around the time I left working full-time for Relix and the extended Dayglo family I stumbled upon a section of a lovely essay by Aldous Huxley titled "The Rest Is Silence."

I thought to myself how much I had experienced writing about music so closely and consistently, how much beauty and pleasure I had partaken in, and over the course of my life through a genuine effort to understand the human spirit the pain I caused. But so long as the music was playing I never fell to my confusion, I just kept dancing. After reading Huxley's words I felt a deep need for the rest and for silence. I'm not one to ignore needs so a long and dark winter unfolded.

Another quote that has had less of an emotional effect on me but a lasting one nonetheless was told to me by my predecessor Raffaela Kenny-Cincotta. She quoted Douglas Adams, who famously said, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." Considering there was no official deadline for this piece, I admit I'm sure it must've flown by over the past two months, but after all I was seeking silence. Regardless, my apologies to the editors of jambands.com for this less than timely article on the Texas Eclipse Festival.

When the 2017 eclipse cast its shadow across the United States I watched it through some black-and-white photographic film, with one layer of silver halide crystals in Tarrytown, NY. I marveled over 70.2% coverage of the sun, but I just couldn't stop thinking about totality.

After 7 years, a third of which I spent with Relix and jambands.com, I finally found the perfect excuse. Texas Eclipse Festival beckoned music enthusiasts and nature lovers alike to Burnet, Texas, for an unforgettable experience from April 5 to April 9, 2024 and despite the changes in my life I was left lingering on their press list.

As I flew down towards Austin the lineup served as great reassurance. The Disco Biscuits, String Cheese Incident, Joe Russo's Almost Dead, Sunsquabi, STS9, and Vulfpeck to name a few. The Sky Stage and Eclipse stages were peppered with EDM from my rave and club filled youth in New York — Maya Jane Coles, Bob Moses, Charlotte de Witte, Tipper, Clozee, Zeds Dead.

The festival grounds were huge. It took me over eight hours to get settled and I was somewhat of a priority. After setting up a standard two-person tent and unwrapping a plastic-wrapped blanket I rested my eyes and awoke under a spectacular star-studded Texas sky. I was alone, ready to embrace whatever the Texas Eclipse Festival had in store.

Beloved English producer Skream was the first set I caught in full. The massive wall of sound pushed vibrations right through me. I was sent back to simpler times when I'd worship the speaker until my back hurt. I wondered why it'd been so long since I cut loose that way as pyrotechnics warmed my face.

The next morning I met an English lad named Jasper. He was 23 — the age I was in 2017 — and there was a light to him. He excitedly told me he was not only conceived during an eclipse in Hungary in 1999, he was the guest of an artist named ZIV, a friend of his late mother. So after a somber but peaceful evening I found myself in a boutique RV eating eggs while ZIV showed us what he had in store.

Vulfpeck was pretty amazing. The fun, the talent, the communication — all so on point. Jack Stratton addressed the eclipse directly. His view was that it was beautiful that we all come together to marvel in the light, to be together and be here after. A stark contrast to the doomsday energy floating around. The eclipse was less than 24 hours away.

We regret to inform all media of the severe weather forecast, including risks of high winds, tornadic activity, large hail, and thunderstorms for later today, including during the eclipse.

At this point everyone was pretty raw. But I wasn't worried. I softly woke up Linnea, looked into her kind, green gold-flecked eyes that had watched me be a fool for the previous days without judgement, and calmly told her what was going on. We decided to stick around.

The Sun is about 400 times bigger than the Moon and it is also about 400 times farther away — a cosmic coincidence. As it reaches totality, dawn and dusk become one. A dome of fractured light surrounds you. People howl like wolves but most are in awe, saying "oh my god" or are completely silent. At the center of the sky the moon is a completely dark void — a contrasted darkness, empty yet full — and around it a halo of pure white fire. For the rest of your life it stays with you, a reminder that you're a cosmic coincidence too. That you're stars.

With that I leave you to your day — I hope a little bit closer to the human spirit, or in search of it, with a resounding silent awe.

You know, I haven't really laughed at The Office in four years. It used to be my show, I even went to one of those super specific TV trivia nights this one time in Tribeca — we didn't win but we did pretty well all things considered. Now I can't even think about it with this pain in my chest. It's a lot like that Cinnabon I threw up the first time I got drunk in Aruba. After a six pack on the beach at 14 I scarfed one down and before long the sparkles of cinnamon and dough shined in the sunset as they poured out of me. They fell dancing down the spiral staircase I climbed to be closer to the sun. My throat was cut up by the spice but it looked pretty. I've never had one since. The Office is like that because it was on when I got the worst phone call of my life, thus far.

My mom always had medical issues, she was dramatic like that. It always felt like she was acting, exaggerating — but to her it was truth. A broken wrist was a broken wing and instead of not being able to flip people off while driving, to her, she couldn't fly. Over the years her body bent and broke at various places inside and out. Most recently it was her eyes. The diagnosis led to me driving her around a lot during that time, which I honestly didn't mind. She would sit there with her red hair, squeeze bottle with the lipstick on its sippy top full of Chardonnay which she insisted was water — and she'd complain and complain about my dad, my brother, the music playing on the radio or the overall state of the world but I loved every moment. She has this way of talking that mirrored life, stories bled into each other, memories and moments had no beginning and end. At times you'd want to die for some silence and before long you'd both be laughing. Even when she was in pain she talked and talked and I drove right at the speed limit — like it was sacred — even if I did speed and she'd complain and the time would stretch forever like I-95 before us.

When the call happened I could tell something was different from all her other hospital trips. David, my mentor, stepfather and the love of my mother's life, he was scared. I can't remember exactly but he said something like, "Get to the hospital your mother is on her way in an ambulance." I told my dad curtly, mom's heading to the hospital, and ran to my car too quick for his response. It was 9ish, maybe? I wouldn't see him 'til sunrise the next morning — the darkest and coldest July had ever known.

Music is weird when you drive. I like to hear the wind and the sound of the ground beneath me. It reminds me I'm controlling this heavy metal thing, that there are lives around me. I really can't remember if it was on during that drive. I got from Tarrytown to Stamford in 19 minutes flat.

The last time I saw my mom before the call, I made that drive. It was Mother's Day. The person who came out looked like she was from a different planet — a sun hat, sunglasses, behind a plastic visor, a yellow construction mask, an N95, a blue doctor's mask, and at the bottom a cloth mask with The Rolling Stones tongue printed on it. As we chatted the distance closed and the masks slowly came off until she told David to take a picture of the two of us smiling. Like a psychic she claimed to be, on that Mother's Day she gave me presents. Mostly old costume jewelry from her past she was cleaning out. Today they are some of my greatest treasures.

I arrived at the ER in about half the time it took me on Mother's Day. As I opened my car door I called David and rushed inside. Imagine my surprise when a man not much older than me in a priest's collar greeted me. It didn't hit me until I told David I was met by a chaplain and he returned my gaze with surprise that I realized or even considered my mom was dead or dying. That's how alive she was all her life — this was an impossibility unfolding in real time.

To be honest, that last memory — the one on Mother's Day — was really my last moments with her. In that room, that LED lit cage, that wasn't my mom anymore. It was science. It was a broken expression of love. I mean, if she hadn't been brain dead, if she hadn't slowly been getting colder, maybe it would've been worth it. But it wasn't.

It's amazing, medicine. It's so ugly and strange but it keeps us together, it tries. We so desperately want to stay with one another — it's so beautiful that it's ugly. I can still hear the machine pumping her lungs. I think about breathing a lot now. That was not breathing. It was really just inflation.

When they told me she was brain dead I broke down completely. I've never cried and raged in confusion like that in my life. It was so unfair. She didn't die of Covid, it was an aneurism in her stomach. David told me that when she was being taken by the EMTs she said, "David, I'm dying." I think about that all the time. She was always right, right until the end.

She always told me I have her hands. Being the foolish boy I was I took great offense. Now I look at their shape and I see beauty. I'm reminded that I'm her son and I am warm. She was right about that too.

I titled this piece There Is No Waiting for Godot, but really the person I was waiting for was my brother Jason. He heard the news when I did but was living an hour and a half away deep in Brooklyn. We waited and waited and the cold lights shone down on her almost corpse. I saw blue tints start to arise on the soft pale skin she would hide from the sun. I hated each moment that passed.

We were told to leave when they pulled it — that the next part was disturbing and violent. As I walked away a part of me never could've left that room or her side. But with that thought I look down at my hands typing and remember how much of her stayed with me too.

I don't remember the ride home, but there couldn't have been music. Suddenly I was back in Tarrytown. The sun was rising at the end of the first week of July and the sky was gray. My dad brought me a cold half a hamburger left over from the Fourth of July. It was the worst thing I've ever had in my life and very weirdly the perfect meal for that moment. My grief started there.

One moment of stillness I do remember was pretty soon after. It was raining and I was walking by the Hudson River Walk in Tarrytown — the same river she showed me on the Upper West Side when I was just born. I stood there overlooking rain dance on the Hudson, bottle in hand. I cursed the sky as music played and rain ruined my headphones. And just as I finished my thought, lightning struck the water, so close to me — and I erupted in laughter. Tears, rain, and wine dripping and mixing as one over my lips.

Years before, right before I was about to go to college for my final year, she called me up to her room. She just looked at me with her eyes — bright, sometimes blue, but in that moment green. She said, "I think you see the world for what it is… and that's good."

I can still hear her saying it right now. Clear as any day. She was saying so much with that. "Please take care of yourself." "I'm proud of you." "I trust you." "I love you."

There's no waiting for god. There's only truth, which is love. If you know a mother's love and its strength then you know it's already here and always will be here — in your hands, in the way you see the world, forever.

My eyes are closed once more, and into the darkness we step. The cadence of my soul in line with the tone of my voice. My warmth aligned with my movements — to live is to dance, to sleep is to die. I want to live forever.

Oh Dionysus, is this not for me? When youth and intellect intersect are we cursed with a sacred history? I remind myself, in hopes of freedom: 1. to always do your best, 2. don't assume, 3. be impeccable with your word… and… why can't I remember? Do I want to keep myself enslaved? Am I not ready for freedom?

Hold on, let me look it up. The one I forgot is the one that made me think of it in the first place! A healthy reminder that often times the answer is within — it's 4. don't take anything personally.

I'll try to remember for real this time. 1. Always do your best, 2. don't make assumptions, 3. don't take anything personally — and again, I hit a wall. This time it was 4. be impeccable with your word! How silly, I broke it in forgetting it. Let's go again. Always do your best, be impeccable with your word, don't assume — I hit a wall again. It's like I know them but refuse to allow them to unfold, like knowing all four isn't allowed.

Let's take a moment to feel them.

Always do your best — with this I feel a mix of hope and despair. Hope in that I believe I can do well and despair in feeling I know I don't know how to try hard at all, that my best is forever unreachable. Always and best — so lofty, yet also rooted in the here and now.

Never assume — I feel absence and void and in that endless possibility. This one frees you from the future and the past. There's no control over what has happened and what will happen. There is only what is. When you add your thoughts or expectations to the experience you separate yourself from it.

Be impeccable with your word — a daunting one indeed. This one requires focus. We allow our thoughts to overflow — our art, our feelings, our ideas. We are encouraged to do so as children because in that Spring lies truth. However, as time goes on and life reflects back into you, that truth can get distorted or blocked. I feel gratitude that the word flows through me with ease but also pain in knowing that this water could have been poisoned and hurt others. I hope to purify it with life.

Don't take anything personally — look at that, I remembered all of them — with this I feel lonely and the desire to become stronger. The freedom is in realizing that your existence is your own and that other's understanding of you is their own responsibility. People will see you how they desire. A fool or a sage, a demon or a hero, a king or a pauper. Regardless of how anyone is seen — you're not beholden to them, only to yourself. How do you see you? That is personal.

Don't forget in this moment you're a lucky one — a stranger to hate. You have so many to thank for that. Continue onward towards true liberation. I adore you, me, and I'll always walk you home.

Now with that written let's write them out all in one go: always do your best, be impeccable with your word, don't assume, don't take anything personally.

And with that we're a little more free.