wesjournal – world meets boy

De-Acquisition: Leaving Records on the Porch

May 16, 2026 · 7:44 pm

location: The Nap Palace • Baltimore, MD

feeling:

melancholy

Well, Spring is already nigh, and my record collection has been asking me whether I even care about it. The answer is, of course, but honestly, not as much as I used to. At least, for some of you that don’t get listened to, having you does not bring me as much joy as buying you did.

A lot of new stuff is coming in. There’s a few new Jewish summer camp records I found on eBay, including one from Blue Star Camps in North Carolina in 1979 and Brandeis-Bardin Institute, where I grew up at (I’ve been deep in a Max Helfman rabbit hole). There’s a box of 250 Jewish CD’s of various sorts that were donated to me by a dear friend from her synagogue that had them sitting in a closet, gathering dust and are awaiting cataloging, ripping, scanning, and writing metadata into MusicBrainz/Archive.org.

And another unknown amount of records and a mandolin and a couple of other string instruments that were willed to me by my Uncle Mickey, my Grandfather’s brother, who died last month with a treasure trove of 33’s, analog recording gear, instruments of all sorts, and an incredible legacy. Uncle Mickey was my first exposure to Old Time music. He played in a banjo orchestra for decades. He taught music all around Southern California, including at Cal State Los Angeles.

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Building Together @ 2026 Religion Communicators Conference (Conferencing April Part II)

April 26, 2026 · 1:17 am

location: The Nap Palace

feeling:

hopeful

listening to: ▶ Steve Reich’s Different Trains with London Contemporary Orchestra | Boiler Room

Somehow, I’ve become a religion communicator. Maybe I’ve always been.

After a whirlwind two weeks of producing Friends Changemaker Weekend and the Religion Communicators Council annual conference, I got hit with a nasty cold. Ten days straight in hotels will do that to you.

I love putting my producer hat back on a few times a year. I spend so much time behind the computer, moving pixels around and submitting invoices, sometimes I forget the work that I’m doing is a spiritual practice. It is a practice that I share with professionals around the country at the intersection of faith, justice, and narrative development.

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From the New World to the World to Come: Michael Tilson Thomas Z”L

April 24, 2026 · 1:55 am

location: baltimore, md

feeling:

energetic

listening to: ▶ Gustav Mahler; David Briggs - Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor - 04 - Symphony no. 5 in C-sharp minor IV. Adagietto

It seems strange, really quite strange, that sitting at the top of my music library tonight, the most recently added album, and there have been many recently, is Mahler’s 5th with the face of the MTT on the cover. Just three days after I added it, with the intention to listen to it in the next week, I read the news today of the death of the great conductor, composer, and arts leader.

The news broke into my feed from the Milken Center, via UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience. While so many organizations and artists are honoring the Maestro, it is fitting for the Milken Center to acknowledge Tilson Thomas’ family roots in the Yiddish theater, and his unique position of carrying on the Thomashevsky legacy to new heights, a capstone on a story that mirrors, magnifies, and personifies the Jewish experience in America.

Juxtaposed with the complexity of Mahler’s thundering dissonant pageantry, I sit down to reflect on that narrative. And Tilson Thomas is considered to be a particularly masterful interpreter of Mahler, for reasons that I’m sure would be fun to learn.

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Conferencing: April 2025, Part I

April 16, 2026 · 11:23 pm

location: a hotel room in cincinnati, oh

feeling:

accomplished

listening to: ▶ thelonious monk - remember (alone in san francisco)

Last weekend, we held Friends Changemaker Weekend for the first time. A merging of Spring Lobby Weekend and Quaker Public Policy Institute, we brought an intergenerational mix to Washington D.C. (well, Arlington, mostly) for 3 days of advocacy training, community-building, and finally, a lobby day against funding for this absurd war in Iran.

One question that came up was “what was one of your earliest memories of advocacy?” I shared with a few people at my table memories of protesting the Iraq War on the street outside of my high school, a distinctly unpopular opinion in conservative Orange County. I still remember the smug, snide faces that Taylor Smith would make about it in Biology class. There was also a Beard for World Peace Facebook group somewhat soon after, though it must have been towards the end of high school, since we didn’t get access to Facebook until we got our .edu emails.

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Dr. Fedup, or How I Learned to Stop Paying to Stream and Self-Host Myself

April 16, 2026 · 1:05 am

location: a hotel in cincinnati, oh

feeling:

determined

listening to: ▶ kacey musgraves - deeper well

I’d like to thank Spotify for raising their rates two years ago for pushing me to accept the fact that the continued enshittification (thanks Cory Doctorow for the word) will not relent, that we will keep getting screwed by subscription services, that we are products, and that I need to take my data back.

It set me off on a journey of self-hosting. I started with a two-bay Synology NAS and realized that I was quickly running out of space to hold my entire media library as well as my archive of photos, videos, documents, stories, and memories. I upgraded to a 4-bay NAS (DS9723+) sporting 2x 10TB and 2x 14 TB drives. Those are sitting at about half full, so a cool 12.1 TB of data currently stored, with a redundant copy.

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Returning To Tomorrow

April 16, 2026 · 12:47 am

The powerful force of nostalgia has been on my mind. The tensions between memory and prayer, between returning to and creating toward. I create maps of covers, this artist with this song, this artist covering that artist, the way the songs fill time and space and connect us to subtle hints about who is valued, who is remembered.

And so this blog, relaunched, redesigned, with a certain time in mind, when writing was easy and emotions were strong and the consequences of honesty seemed to be less than the consequences of lying.

It’s hard now in my 30’s to feel like I can write honestly, freely. Every word seems to be a trap. Why this one or that one? Why this narrative or that one? What am I withholding because of the publicness of the forum? We’ve seen so much of the internet disappear. So little new is made. So few words are written when we used to write like our lives depended on it. For many, our lives did depend on it. Those days on LJ with our small circles of being known, with very real struggles and very dangerous consequences.

We will see what comes out of this latest edition. If nothing else, to get my hands moving and my mind connected to the choice to hit ‘Publish’. There’s a lot I need to publish over the next 10 years, so let’s get writing.