Stories

Posted on April 8, 2025 by max

I’ve been eating a lot of Pimento cheese. It’s kind of stupid, but I was inspired to try it because Mike Ehrmantraut eats it in Better Call Saul. That used to be, and probably still is, my favorite show. I used to feel just like Jimmy McGill. Some guy, fundamentally decent, slipping endlessly towards his dark destiny. Punished endlessly for being “good,” but rewarded by the world when he finally gave into his true nature.

***That age old internet adage***
And that was the moment Jimmy became Saul.

I could talk at length at why it’s stupid and self-indulgent to consider myself analogous to Jimmy, but I’m going to zoom out as I do and talk about how stupid and self-indulgent it is to compare yourself to any character at all. My entire life I spent understanding the world through the lens of stories I’ve consumed. “Oh, that [event] reminds me of [that movie] .” “If we were in [TV Show] , I’d be [Shameless Protagonist] and you’d be [Condescending Secondary Character] .” “After [their fictional breakup] , they did [the exact same stupid shit I did] .” It’s a recursive pattern. I’m like Jimmy McGill. How? Well, because Jimmy McGill is like me.

When your entire worldview is a house of mirrors it’s difficult to know which “you” is the actual source of the reflection. Who am I without my stories? Would I be the same person if I had a different story?

I thought of a funny idea the other day— your backstory doesn’t matter. Let’s say you walk up to a stranger and say “hi.” You could make up an entirely new backstory about yourself and they wouldn’t know. What does it matter, in that moment, whether I went to UofA or UCLA? What does it matter that I’m from Washington and not New York? What does it matter if my name is Marcello or Max? You might be tempted to say— well, it’s what happens next that matters. I disagree, at least ontologically. For every person you meet, you may as well have rendered into existence just a few frames before. Your past is irrelevant to them, no matter what your past is, because they weren’t around for it. What does matter is if what you relay to them is true. It doesn’t matter that I went to UofA vs UCLA— but it would matter if I went to UofA but said I went to UCLA. The truth of the retelling matters for exactly the same reason the fact of the retelling does not— who I am, in this moment, is the only thing. How I am, and the way I present myself to this hypothetical stranger, could have been formed whether I grew up in Washington or New York. They will, in an instant, retrofit a backstory for me to make the path I took line up with the face I am presenting. However, if that path culminates in a lie, then the entire path just led to me being a liar. In this present moment, all they know of me is that truth. So hello stranger— who am I? Marcello? Or Max?

***To be honest***
I don’t even know which perspective I’m writing the blog from anymore.

I’ve lost track of which one is the lie and which one is the truth. But it’s okay. It doesn’t really matter anymore. The stories we tell ourselves will never be fully accurate to reality, because by nature, reality is not a story. The literal truth of the story matters less than the emotional truth. At least, that’s how I see the world, and I’m done feeling guilty about it. For years I’ve been deleting pictures from Instagram, going by different name, moving apartments and convincing myself that any of that changes anything. We live in a time where it is no longer possible not to perform for the world. So rather than performing authenticity, is it not more authentic to simply perform?

Scattered dreams, far-off memories. A year or so back, we got in an argument and I, like I was wont to do then, compared myself to Jimmy McGill. To me, it was an honest expression of grief and pain and frustration. Jimmy’s story was simply a proxy I could use— a shorthand. He was always down. He used that as an explanation for his sadsack behavior. She had never seen the show, so my shorthand was irrelevant. What she saw was a man experiencing life through someone else’s script. And in that moment, she knew our worldviews couldn’t collide. She could see what I couldn’t— these stories are fed to us meticulously through stagecraft and scripts and color grading and reshoots. She, in her line of work, had seen it from the inside. Lived it. I still believed in the magic. It still worked on me. She, who for her whole life told these stories, was begging me— tacitly— to be there, presently, and exist for better or worse. But I— who spent my whole life consuming these stories— went no deeper than the characters she played. Another joke— a man who sees the world through stories falls in love with a woman who tells them. I think you can guess the punchline.

I tried, in our aftermath, to be present with the world. To exist, moment to moment. To lay in the hammock, to water my pothos, to put on the sweater. But I can’t. To me, the hammock is a plot twist, the pothos is a MacGuffin and the sweater is the end credits. I can’t even think about the past without integrating it into a narrative. Why am I even writing this now? I’ve spent so long waiting— processing— existing— just to get overwhelmed and return right here, to the page. To my movies. To my songs, to my stories. So why fight any longer? Maybe I just need to get off this treadmill and give into my nature. Become the character. Stop pretending to be “real.” Ironically, it’s the most truthful thing I can do.

So maybe I am like Jimmy. Maybe this is the moment Jimmy becomes Saul. Bravo Vince. This sounds dramatic, but I am clear, I am level, and I am ready. I think you are all aware that something big is coming.

I wrote a story: A man plays one guy who writes songs and another guy who writes a movie about himself writing a play. And at the end of it, he finds out if there’s really someone at the end of the hall of mirrors or if the reflections keep going, going, forever.

Welcome to True Modern Romance.

Talk soon -mbk

Posted in Diary | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Possibility™

Posted on March 8, 2025 by max

Been a while. I’ve been struggling to blog properly— for context, I had this Giant Sweeping Blog Post™ in mid-February that was trying to make some philosophical connection between Special Relativity and the way we as humans perceive patterns as a survival mechanism. Blah blah. I almost broke my brain writing it and remembered I’m not nearly as smart as my manic episodes suggest.1

***February 2025, in retrospect***
A month lost in my head.

Time has been slipping by extremely quickly. Meanwhile, I’ve been more productive than ever— I’ve made a ton of music, made a ton of content, and begun working on my next tentpole project a la the Junk Male short film. Can’t say too much about that quite yet, but I will anyway. We’ll call it the Codename: TMR Show project. Essentially, it’s a series in which my character, let’s call him Codename: Max Noir, investigates the True state of Modern Romance™ in an attempt to make sense of his recent break up. But really, it’s a story of a man who has lost faith in meaning and truth and is struggling to lean on his friends to bring him back to reality. It’s a funny, awkward, social commentary with an undercurrent of existential dread. It’s a mix between a sitcom and a podcast, packaged as an uncanny, hyper-real documentary-style content skit. The ensemble cast acts as themselves to varying degrees of fictionalization. It’s been completely enveloping my brain.

The loose narrative is that Codename: Max Noir is in the process of writing a script for a film in which he plays a fictionalized version of himself. It gets pretty meta, because in reality, I am writing a film, in which I play a fictionalized version of myself, and Codename: Max Noir is a sort of intermediary charactery I play to bridge the gap between Total Reality™ and Total Fiction™. It gets even more meta, to an absurd degree, when you remember that I am actually Marcello, who is playing Max Bennett Kelly™ the persona, who is playing Codename: Max Noir, who is writing a script where he plays a “fictionalized” Codename: Max Noir. Oh, and Codename: Max Noir also breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience, but the other characters on camera don’t know there’s an audience. Yeah. Can you see my struggle?

I’ve enjoyed playing him in the sense that, much like Hollywood Thompson before him, Codename: Max Noir exemplifies my worst tendencies and allows me to externalize them, observe them, and stop fucking doing them. Essentially, he’s a neurotic, self-obsessed, pseudo-philosophical navel gazer suffering from Compulsive Derealization-Adjacent Overanalysis™. He takes any mundane topic and abstracts it into meaninglessness, perpetually losing the forest for the trees. It’s played for humor in the Codename: TMR Show, but it’s really painful to experience in daily life. The silver lining of the whole thing is that by turning this habit of mine into a comedy bit, I’m allowed to compartmentalize it and easily recognize when I am doing it in real life. For example, I’ll be on a date and start launching into some theory or tangent and my brain will go wait a minute… haven’t I already done this in an episode of the Codename: TMR Show? and stop the thought process in its tracks. It’s like a shock collar or something. I am tired of being this way. And I had to create this entire artistic exosphere just to incubate personal change. It’s working, but it makes me really envious of how people who don’t make art are able to enact change in their lives. It’s a mystery to me.

About a week ago, I was watching Friends2 and Rachel called some guy “sweet,” and I thought— huh, what makes someone sweet? Is “sweet” when someone does a nice thing for you? Is “sweet” when someone is endearing? Awkward? Is “sweet” mutually exclusive with “cool?” Is it better to be “sweet” than “cool?” But she didn’t like the guy, so is “sweet,” while widely considered a good thing, actually bad when it comes to a successful love life? Is Rachel’s definition of “sweet” different than Monica’s? And so the rabbit hole goes on and on, all in the span of a few seconds. This all leads to a complete jumble of meaninglessness and no conclusions, and my understanding of the concept of “sweetness” is no stronger than it was before. The irony is that, before going down the rabbit hole, I actually had a better understanding of what “sweet” is. It just… is. I know when someone or something is sweet. Because of my Compulsive Derealization-Adjacent Overanalysis™, I actually lose the meaning that is useful in every day life.

In this instance, the spiral broke my brain and I had to go take a hot bath and shave my legs3. I actually took a few days to recover from this one— only last night when I did yoga and a few minutes of Nadi Shodhana Pranayama did I come back to reality. When I’m in this Compulsive Derealization-Adjacent Overanalysis™ mode, everything becomes “flat,” like literally my depth perception, or at least my perception of my depth perception, goes away. Everything is fully in focus, extremely important, ready to be picked apart and viewed from every angle. I see every detail of someone’s clothing, I hear the subtext of the words they’re speaking, I smell the dinner someone is cooking the next apartment over. It’s sensory overload and every single input is subject to my incessant questioning. It’s no way to live. I’m tired of it. Thank God Codename: Max Noir exists as an outlet for that.

***A side tangent***
Is a character you play sorta like an Innie in Severance? Think about it. Like how an Innie exists in a perpetual state of work so that the Outie can live life, does Codename: Max Noir exist only in a perpetual state of emotional turmoil so that the “real me” can be happy and present?

I know this tendency to overthink is a gift as much as it is a curse, however. My ability to break something down to its atomic structure is extremely useful when it comes to creating meaningful art. In the Codename: TMR Show, I can analyze each creative decision— multicam, 24fps, flat broadcast color grade, hot mic, etc— as a means to an end to create a hyper-real, uncanny vibe. Okay, great. But where does it end? In music, for example, this way of thinking can actually be extremely destructive. Whereas film exists more on the left end of Logic <> Emotion spectrum, music exists way more on the right. It’s almost pure expression. The lyrics themselves4 don’t matter as much as the emotion behind them. When I’m writing with an artist and they want to say something along the lines of “I hate you, you fucking suck” I always tell them that in the language of music, what the listener will interpret is not a condemnation of said party’s character and more an expression of the singer’s unresolved feelings towards them, or a representation of said party’s impact on the singer. In other instances, sometimes a shittily recorded vocal take is the one, and you should resist the logical temptation to re-record with a better quality mic or room or whatever. If the feeling is there, that’s all that matters.

***A case study***
Happy, Healthy, Well-Adjusted.

When the chorus of the song initially blew up on TikTok, I was mortified. It was just a demo! A scratch vocal! I just did it on my demo mic! Oh no! Before releasing the song, I tried a version where I completely re-recorded it with a better mic in a better room. It sounded “better” in a fidelity sense, but it felt infinitely worse in, you know, A MUSICAL SENSE. Thank God Codename: Emily was there to tell me it fucking sucked, or my entire life would probably be different now.

Anyways— in my experience, film relies much more on “quality” or “precision” or whatever you want to call it. Filming Junk Male taught me that every set up counts, that the more prep you do, the better a scene is. However, I also know that you can “dead” a scene by performing it too many times. It’s a balance, but still closer to a Logical process in our little spectrum. By contrast, music is much more of an explosion. Usually, the first take is the best. You can’t control the environment as much to create any given emotion, in fact you can actually destroy the possibility of a feeling by trying to create it.

Ah. And there’s the rub, isn’t it? Much like Codename: Max Noir is my Innie to sever me from my overthinking, perhaps I am attracted to music as a whole because it teaches me that very lesson I stated above— you can sometimes destroy a possibility by trying too hard to force an outcome. It’s my core contradiction. In my life, I firmly believe that I can make anything happen. I have never set my mind to anything and not accomplished it almost exactly as intended. But is life really about trying to move an unmoveable object? Are we really Sisyphus? Perhaps we need to give in to gravity, or entropy, or whatever the fuck I was trying to get at in my Giant Sweeping Blog Post™ earlier this month. Maybe to get the ball rolling, you actually have to stop pushing and just let it roll.

Anyways, I’m back in my body and ready to start the rollout5 of not only the Codename: TMR Show but True Modern Romance™ itself. But I’m fucking scared, okay? And I’m not going to overanalyze the feeling, or pick it apart, or try to define what “fear” is, I know that I’m fucking scared because I’m putting something vulnerable and weird and new and boundary-pushing into the world and I have no idea if it’s going to work. Right now, I’m comfortable living in my little realm of Possibility™, where it could blow up or it could flop. It’s Schrodinger’s content series. It’s all potential energy. On a quantum level, you actually collapse infinite possibilities into a single reality simply by observing— on a macro, real world level, we see this every day. It’s simple. You cannot do anything without actually doing it. You can think about it, you can hypothesize, you can analyze, but nothing actually happens without Action™. It’s actually so simple it’s mind numbing— nothing gets done unless you do it. Uh, duh. It’s an immutable truth. A little baby can understand causality. It’s so funny that we needed to invent physics and atomic microscopes and the Large Hadron Collider just to study the most fundamental concepts in the universe and go— oh, yeah, I already knew that.

Okay, enough of the physics talk, big guy. Do you hear yourself? Don’t try to control the outcome or you’ll destroy the possibility. Blah blah. See you all soon. -mbk

FOOTNOTES:
1. A hyperbole.
2. After HIMYM, I’m working my way through sitcom history to help me write the Codename: TMR Show.
3. My version of David Goggins’ accountability sessions where he shaves his head in the mirror, only way more effeminate and itchy a few days later.
4. The anchor to logic, or the closest thing to an appeal to Logos, in any given song.
5. No pun intended.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I Made It Rain Before, I Can Probably Do It Again

Posted on February 20, 2025 by max

I finally finished How I Met Your Mother. I think it’s hilarious that this show is one of the most recurring topics in this blog. But what can I say, it’s been an important part of my life. And guess what guys…

***I have to say it***
I liked the ending.

I think I saved myself from the disappointment by binging it. If I was watching it week to week, year to year, only for the last 10 minutes to undermine the perceived plot of the show, I’d probably be pissed too. However, the funny part is that I did watch it week to week way back when the last season was airing. I was 16. I used to watch it with my first girlfriend, Codename: Winterwood. It was our “thing.” We’d sit on the couch at her parents’ house and watch HIMYM together. I loved that, back then – the simple act of sharing a show with someone you love. I had never experienced that before. The lyric in “Losing A Whole Year” about being stuck with the tube didn’t seem tragic to me yet. What do you mean “stuck with”? The tube is awesome. I also don’t know what AquaLube is. This song is awesome!

When Codename: Winterwood and I broke up, we were about 3 episodes from the HIMYM finale. You can look up the dates and it tracks – we broke up a little after mid-winter break, which happens mid-February, putting our demise somewhere around the airing of S9E20 “Daisy.” After we broke up, I couldn’t bring myself to finish the show. It was ours – how could I do it without her? I saw this as some sort of pubescent martyrdom, the proof of my heartbreak, a romantic rejection of the sunk cost fallacy. 9 seasons worth of sitting on that couch was not for nothing.

***I’ll never found out how Ted met the Mother***
THAT’S how much I loved you.

To be honest, I held onto that sacrifice for the next 10 or so years. Any time someone brought up HIMYM, and the inevitable discussion of the contentious ending, I had a pre-packaged response ready to go. “Yeah, me and my ex watched it together, but we broke up right before the end so I never actually saw it.” It became an integral part of my romantic narrative, weirdly enough. I saw that first relationship, and that first shared experience with someone else, as something sacred that I didn’t want to mar with reality. I suppose I found the idea of HIMYM having a bad ending a little bit too on the nose. It seemed a little forced, no? That my love story should end up just as ugly as the show that defined it? In a way, sheltering myself from the ending preserved the illusion that was shattered by the break up. No, I would never have that magical storybook ending with my first love. That’s just reality – I can deal with that. What I could not deal with was that there’s no magical storybook ending even in the most romantic, idealized, fictionalized version of our world. I had to keep on believing. I had to believe this heartbreak wouldn’t be the end of me. I’m only 16 – there’s still another love story out there. Look how many people Ted had to meet before he found who he would end up with. He didn’t let one failure stop him.

***My first critical mistake in dating***
Identifying with Ted Evelyn Mosby.

Watching the show again as an adult, I was amazed at how many ideas of love I had learned from HIMYM. I guess in the 10 years since, the memories of the show had faded, or maybe I had repressed them along with the heartbreak, but the lessons I learned from Ted had remained. Or, I suppose, had remained. Honestly, after my most recent breakup, I’ve sorta stopped believing in the magic of it all. But not for lack of trying. I’ve been dating, yes, and having a lot of fun. Found a few women I like. But none of them that would make me want to double back in the cab and grab the blue French horn. I must have subconsciously started watching HIMYM again to try and remember what that feels like.

It was like a time capsule. I would laugh at Ted’s starry eyed optimism and reminisce on how strongly I used to replicate him. I thought of all the big romantic speeches I had given to the girls in my life. Remembered all the crazy grand gestures. To ask Codename: Winterwood to junior homecoming, I had a friend give her a pirate map of her school with only the first clue mapped out. She’d go to it, receive a clue from another friend, and add it to the map, all eventually leading to a treasure chest in her sixth period Spanish class that I was hiding inside of dressed as a pirate. I didn’t even know this teacher, I didn’t even go to this school. I skipped an entire day to orchestrate this, just to ask her to homecoming. Of course I did – I was in love.

Almost a decade later I took a 12 hour flight to see a girl for about 6 hours. At the airport, the TSA agent was curious why I only had a backpack for a trip to London. I said I was just popping over. I barely slept on the flight – too much coffee. I rode the train for an hour to her place, let myself in, and waited for her to get off work. I was exhausted but did my best to ask her about her day. She was overworked but did her best to tell me. We watched Gogglebox and pretended like the physical distance between us wasn’t smaller than the distance between us on that couch. We went to bed and then I woke up the next morning, rode the train back to Heathrow, and took another 12 hour flight home. Another hour Uber back to my place and slept for a week. I did all of this, just to see her for a few hours. Of course did – I was in love.

My first relationship and my last, bookended by How I Met Your Fucking Mother of all things. The romantic gestures that used to make me feel alive had turned into something that almost killed me. “Losing A Whole Year” of TV on the couch with Codename: Winterwood turned into “Losing Three Years” of a home and a life. I used to do Connor’s homework so he would drive me over to her place after school, just to watch TV. Now I understand the song, because TV became a deadly routine disguised as a last vestige of love. How time changes things. I don’t even feel like the same guy.

The idea of finding someone I would ever be compelled to do something huge for, ever again, seems ludicrous. Even sadder, it just seems exhausting. Why do any of it, if it’s going to end anyways? If even TED MOSBY gets an ending so bad that it ruins the legacy of one of the most popular shows ever made, what hope do I have? I don’t think I have another blue French horn in me. Hell, I won’t even go past Mid City to grab a drink these days. And the funny part is, the horrifically awful unbelievably tragic part is, the less I care, the more dates I go on. What lesson do I glean from this? I used to scrape and claw. I would find someone who lit me on fire and I would do anything for them. I would walk to the ends of the Earth. I thought I could move mountains for her. I thought I could yell at the sky and make it rain. Now I set a $40 limit for a first date and I have to start a Google Calendar. It’s all very sad. To have success in dating is to feel unfulfilled in love. Okay, I can accept that if I have to. I feel physically incapable of putting romance above my career, of putting someone else’s needs above my own. My body rejects it. It’s self preservation? What have I ever gotten from it? What did Ted ever get from it?

***But then I saw the ending***
And I liked it.

I know, I know, people were mad about Ted backsliding to Robin. BUT IT’S THERE FROM THE FIRST EPISODE. It’s so obviously the throughline for the show, especially on a fast binge. But maybe people were too preoccupied with the titular Mother. And I also know that people hated how little time was spent with the Mother post-titular Meeting. But… did they miss the titular Title? It’s about how Ted met her, not about what happened after. I know people think they know what they want, but it would have just turned into a generic sitcom happy ending. That’s not reality, and the show was (at least early on) supposed to be a more “realistic” take on a sitcom, of the winding messy roads we take, on the unknowable designs of fate and coincidence, the choices and consequences that add up in tiny ways and shape our destiny. It’s who we are becoming that matters, not who we become. It was never a show about Ted’s life with the Mother – he’s telling his kids this, they obviously already know that part. He’s telling his kids about his life that led him to their Mother – and that life revolved around Robin. Of course they were going to end up together. Or, at least, “end up” together in the sense that the show ends there. We’re left to assume that, in the language of storytelling, they live happily ever after forever and ever. Preserved in happiness for all eternity, because that’s where the story ends. Perhaps that’s why people don’t like the ending. They actually just didn’t want it to end at all. Because the show trained them to appreciate the journey. That’s the truth of the human experience, I think, or at least the glimpse of it that the show meant to reveal to us. In reality, there is no ending… there’s just things happening. I could never have the storybook small town ending with Codename: Winterwood because fundamentally, the “end” doesn’t exist. The only ending is when we die and the public opinion on death is even worse than the HIMYM ending. No, our romance ended where it needed to. So did every romance in my life. And rather than live believing I’m playing out some epilogue where the end of my last relationship was actually the end of the journey, I need to revert to my Tedness and get back out there and believe that I’m actually looking for The One again. Maybe it’s an illusion. Maybe it’s dramaturgy. But what’s the point of doing any of this if you don’t believe that? Why go on a date hoping to get swept off my feet if I don’t even believe that type of thing is possible anymore? I set myself up for disappointment by numbing myself against possibility. I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know how to fix it. Maybe it just takes time. Maybe I’ll just wake up one day and remember how to do it. Maybe I’ll meet someone at a train stop and I’ll realize all the yellow umbrellas I’ve been overlooking this whole time. What other choice do I have? Believe that all of this is meaningless chaos we find patterns in so our brains don’t explode from entropy? Or do I suck it up, dust off the dirt, put some frozen peas on my black eye and yell at the sky again? I want to make it rain again. I know I can. Fate works in mysterious ways, after all – imagine if I had watched the ending of HIMYM, back then, and hated it. I never would have rediscovered it later and it never would have given me the faintest glimmer of hope that romance still exists out there. So, for better or worse, I accept my Tedness. No use running away from it anymore. I keep on trying. That’s all I can do. I made it rain before. I can do it again.

***So there***
How’s that for a speech?

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Onwards

Posted on January 29, 2025 by max

New music, huh. Where do we begin?

Well, I’m releasing music again. It’s been a long time. I haven’t put anything out since 2023, which feels bizarre. Required a bit of a redefinition of my “job” ~

***The lingering question***
Am I a musician if I’m not putting out music?

Obviously, yes. In the time since I last released, I’ve made more music than I have in years. In fact, I had an entire other EP that I was supposed to release last summer (more on that later). Dozens and dozens of sessions. Late night experiments making strange avant-jazz emo solo shit. An entire project of music made on stream with Nico. A year of feelings and thoughts and moments captured permanently in the only way I truly know how.

***A less lingering but still fair question***
Where is the music then?

To answer that question, we have to travel all the way back to “Junk Male.” The EP, not the short film. Now that I can officially say the rollout has been put to rest (long overdue), I suppose I can outright explain my intentions and vision and other things I can only truly reflect on now that the era is over. “Junk Male” was my reaction to the moment “Happy, Healthy, Well-Adjusted” had on TikTok. Tl;dr a video I posted in my garage turned my life around overnight, and it freaked. Me. Out. I was so new to making solo music. My band had just broken up and I was learning how to produce and write and express my singular vision for the first time. It was terrifying. I had always relied on my friends to help me decide what was good, what felt right, what was worth playing and releasing. And suddenly, a song – well, not even a song, the unfinished chorus of a song – had millions and millions of views on an app I had been posting on for 6 days. I was acutely aware, then, of my shortcomings. I didn’t know how to finish the song. I didn’t have a brand for people to attach themselves to. Shit, I didn’t even know if I liked the song.

HHWA came out at a time when MGK’s “Tickets to My Downfall” was in the zeitgeist and fans of the post-MGK style of pop punk revival attached themselves to the distorted guitar stabs and the self-deprecatory-pseudo-flex about my grandma’s necklace. This was awesome and I am so grateful that the song was able to be attached to this wave, but the problem I had at the time was that I didn’t want to be a pop-punk artist. This may sound a bit gatekeepery, but as a kid who grew up listening to the genre’s more left-of-Green Day emo offshoots I reviled even the TERM “pop punk.” I remember a time where referring to that type of music by that title would get you laughed out of a RYM forum. Call me old-fashioned but I didn’t think anyone making genuine “punk” would ever call it that themselves, let alone POP PUNK. I grew up with the idea that if you had to call yourself punk… you weren’t really punk.

Of course, nowadays I have an entirely different view (or perhaps just a more nuanced one). But at the time, I was still mourning the loss of my band (which, let’s face it, was very pop punk). Perhaps I thought that pop punk had ruined my life. Perhaps I thought it was impossible to make genuine homages to this sound without a full band behind you. This may seem strange given my output since, but I was determined to take my solo stuff in a completely different direction. I had attached myself to Dominic Fike, late-game Brockhampton, Aries, Jean Dawson, stuff in that camp. Everything I was making was supposed to be in THAT world. THAT was the kind of solo artist I wanted to be. This was what everything I made during this time sounded like. Everything except HHWA.

To be honest, and maybe this will lift the curtain a little bit, I was inspired to make HHWA after my friend Slush Puppy released a song called “Juliette.” I loved the kick-kick-snare. In my quest for Lorem-placement subtlety, I forgot that songs were allowed to be unabashedly loud-soft and have an indulgent angsty chorus. As an experiment, I made a quick demo using two different sets of lyrics from unused band songs. One set for the quiet verses, and one set for the chorus. I didn’t think much of it. It was just a fun thing to do. At the time, I was still in the thralls of Codename: Emily, so as I was wont to do in my quest for her validation I sent the demo over to her.

***Her response, and I quote***

“Max, this is it.”

This spark of reassurance set the tone for the next few years of my career. I posted a snippet of me playing the chorus from the speakers in my garage and the rest is history. The song, and by extension my fledgling artist project, was immediately placed in this post-MGK camp. And to be honest, I was PISSED. Didn’t they see this is supposed to be an IRONIC pop punk song? Don’t they see this song is making FUN of them? God, I was insufferable1.

Maybe I was just self-sabotaging my own happiness. I should have been so excited that my dreams were coming true. But no, like an ingrate, I couldn’t be happy because it wasn’t coming true my way. Talk about control freak. In all of my writing sessions post-HHWA, everyone wanted me to recapture that pop punk magic. I refused to do it. I was going to control my own destiny. So for my follow-up, I decided to release “The Outsiders,” a song I did with Slush and Nico. It was about as different from HHWA as I could manage, but it was a lot closer to all the other unreleased stuff I was making. Remember, HHWA was an outlier. Suffice to say, The Outsiders did not blow up the same way HHWA did. I shouldn’t have been surprised – I didn’t ride the proverbial wave, and I suffered the consequences. To me, though, it was a conscious sacrifice. I’d rather maintain my artistic integrity than pander to whatever preconceived notion the internet had created for me2.

After “The Outsiders”, I doubled down on this indie-chill vibe and released “Fresh Green at the Gallery.” Despite my attachment to this song, it did not live up to the HHWA numbers. In fact, despite being on New Music Friday, Fresh Green kinda flopped. At this point, I was freaking out. Did I make a mistake betting on myself? Was I supposed to just be the pop punk guy? Who was I to question my talents, and more so – who was I to reject the listeners who had changed my life? These fears and insecurities came to a head on my 25th birthday, when I wrote the first verse and chorus of my song “Birthday.” It was a return to pop punk, and what do you know – it blew up on IG Reels. And how did I react? Again, instead of being grateful for the internet, I interpreted this moment as my greatest fears coming true. Maybe I wasn’t this genre-defying musician after all. Maybe I was just the pop punk guy. Maybe I couldn’t escape my nature. Maybe the internet knew better than I did.

***To further complicate the lingering question***
How do you even DEFINE a musician?

I decided if I was going to be the pop punk guy, I was going to do it on my own terms. Again, control freak alert. I had a collection of songs from the last year that eventually became “Junk Male.” I set out to reinterpret them through a pop punk lens. Ultimately, as much as I tried to escape my roots, the pop punk was a part of my soul, and the songs very easily fit this sound. I got a band together – Jeremy, Reef and Daniel – and got to work recording these songs in a live setting. My vision here was that if I was going to make a pop punk record, I would do it in a way that felt like a true authentic homage to my favorite aspects of the genre. Rather than rehashing the Blink-182, Fall Out Boy, Green Day sounds of my other contemporaries3, I wanted to lean into the more abrasive side – the eyebrow-raising rawness of “Pinkerton.” The cathartic navel-gazing of Max Bemis, the dark sensitivity of Brand New4.

What came of out of it was a messy, rough-around-the-edges, expressionist body of music that was released to the world as “Junk Male.” All of my self-loathing, my hatred of the internet and LA that led me to this point, the exhausting experience of my communion with my Codename: Emily muse, all of it wrapped in a garage room-sound, RAT pedal Strat, trash can snare drum, first-take vocal authenticity. I almost killed myself engineering the live band with zero experience, and nearly succeed when I decided I’d be mixing the entire thing as well5. I had something to prove to the world, which is a monumental task, but not nearly as Sisyphean as trying to prove to myself. In the end, after months and months of painstaking work, I did it. I made something real.

***And what did I learn?***

I really didn’t needa do all that.

I succeeded in making exactly what I set out to, but at what cost? The shortcomings of “Junk Male” come from the vertical nature of its creation – all the parts, all the lyrics, the sound design, all came from one person who had hubris but was ultimately unqualified for the job. It was not a fun project to make. The concepts and ideas present in the record felt like toxic sludge passing through me. I felt like I was presenting myself in the absolute worst light. I distanced myself from this feeling by calling the narrator of the EP a “character.” Once it was finished, I was so removed from the thoughts and feelings that informed the record that I had no other choice but to rationalize it as performance art. To top it off, the self-isolating way I created the record led to a deep feeling of loneliness and disillusionment with my job and craft. Getting “Junk Male” out of my system felt more painful than triumphant.

Once I put it out into the world, I felt deeply embarrassed. Not just because of the revealing nature of the songs, but because of my thoughts and behavior. With this finished body of work in front of me, it was easier to reflect on what had led me to create it. It felt foul, sick, misinformed. It wasn’t some sweeping statement on the genre, the state of the industry, a monument to self-refliance, no – it was just music. Just like everyone’s music is ultimately just music. I felt so ashamed for spending so much time making something as a REACTION to something else. Why was I on SUCH a high horse about this whole anti-pop punk thing? Who was I to pass judgment on anyone else in the scene? Why was I so ungrateful? Jesus, did I say any of this bullshit to people around me? No wonder I was so lonely. No wonder I hated LA. Maybe I was a real junk male, after all. And here I was thinking it was performance art.

I feel much better now, luckily. I suppose that’s the whole purpose of making stuff. It’s a way to take the thoughts and feelings you’re unable to cope with and put them into this sorta sensory time capsule so that once they part from you they’re not a part of you. This gross, ugly version of myself is now not myself – it is forever externalized in the EP “Junk Male.” I can finally move on.

With “Junk Male” behind me, my love letter to the genre written and delivered, I can say without a doubt that I’ve gotten my pop punk rocks out. I don’t think the genre has anything left for me. And for all the disdain and contempt I’ve treated it with, it has given me so much love and connection and catharsis and understanding in return. Pop punk, I love you. I’m sorry for all the shit I talked. MGK, I’m sorry for deeming the scene post-MGK as if that was something derogatory. I’m sorry that I made an EP to prove that I was better than anyone else. I’m not. Pop punk made me. It was my first favorite genre. Listening to “1,039 Smoothed Out Sloppy Hours” as an 11-year-old gave me the faintest glimmer of an idea that perhaps I could write songs, too. Pop punk incubated me, pop punk taught me I-V-vi-IV, pop punk put my song on a wave that’s led me to live the life of my dreams for the last few years. Thank you, pop punk.

***I’m sorry***
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say that without wincing a little bit.

Aaaaand this brings us back to today. Where’s the music? Well, like I said before, I made a whole other EP. It was the conceptual follow-up to “Junk Male.” I called it “Icky Guy.” It was completely finished, in the label’s system, and ready for release. So what happened? Well, to be honest, it followed in “Junk Male’s” footsteps a bit too much. It delved into hip-hop, sure, had a grandiose maximalist slant to contrast “Junk Male’s” minimalism, but ultimately it didn’t feel like a true progression. A baby step, but enough to warrant an entire other EP? I wasn’t confident.

Deliverance came this summer when I went through my breakup. The world was uncertain again, and I was able to reconsider all aspects of my life with this in mind. Will my choices take me where I need to go? A lot of things didn’t make it through the grinder, but first on the chopping block was the EP. “Icky Guy” was going to push me further down the path “Junk Male” created. This was by nature – it was the successor, after all. Furthermore, the songs were OLD. Some of the verses I had written almost seven years ago! The worst part? I feel like this EP still had something to prove. If I’m being honest with myself, I made it with the intention of impressing others with its weirdness and abstractness and boundary pushing. This music wasn’t for me. And suddenly, as if from a distant dream, I remembered what I set out to do, all those years ago, before HHWA.

With this clarity, I didn’t feel capable of spending one more second in my self-defined pop punk world. It wasn’t authentic anymore. By this point in my life, I had touched a little money, been through a serious relationship, traveled the world. I was about to be 28. I didn’t live in the garage anymore. Making “Junk Male” didn’t prove I wasn’t “the pop punk guy” – growing up did. All this time I was pushing so hard to escape from a trap I didn’t realize I myself was perpetuating. It was time to let it go. It was time to move on. “Icky Guy” was a relic, an appendix, an epilogue to a story I didn’t want to tell anymore. I thought it was about time I returned to the original vision. In a whirlwind, I created an entire new EP with Tyler. God bless his heart, we did this shit FAST. And so, the new record feels more pertinent and true to what I’ve experienced in the last six months. It feels fresh. It feels necessary in a way the other EP didn’t. So, rest in peace “Icky Guy,” we may never see your like again. Maybe as a YouTube exclusive.

Choosing to part ways with a completed body of work was the single most empowering thing I’ve ever done as an artist. No longer am I making music as a reaction to external factors. No longer am I trying to control the narrative around me. For the first time since the overnight success of HHWA, I feel like the reins of my career have been passed back into my hands. I accept and stand behind what I am about to put out into the world, and relinquish any semblance of control over what happens from here on out. I made this music for me.

What do I glean from this? Did I actually learn more from NOT releasing than I did by releasing? What exactly am I doing here? After all, the question remains – what is a musician? What is an artist? Is anyone who picks up an instrument a musician? Is anyone who shares a piece of art an artist? If I’ve learned anything from my relationship with pop punk, it’s that using concrete terms and definitions to understand something as nebulous and unfathomable as art is an exercise in futility. No, I’ve learned my lesson. In my year off of releasing music, am I still a musician? There’s no objective answer. I suppose the only solace, the only guiding light, the irrefutable cartesian conclusion, comes from deciding how I, in the deepest most subjective reaches of my overly analytical soul, feel about it…

So, how do I feel about it?

***To answer the lingering question***
I am more of a musician than I’ve ever been.

With all that said, I present to you the new era. “Loser,” the first single, comes out February 4th, 2025.

Thanks for reading -mbk

FOOTNOTES:
1. I mean, I’m writing a blog about it 4 years later, so I haven’t really gotten much better. Your fault for reading
2. In retrospect, there’s a much more nuanced way I could have played this, but I am grateful for this choice
3. No shade – love these guys – just wanted to prove something to myself I guess lol
4. I know, I know, sorry
5. Except 2AM which Nico mixed thanks Nico:)

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Closing Time

Posted on January 23, 2025 by max

There are times in my life where I feel Open to the universe, and times where I feel Closed to it. I don’t think I have much control over which state I’m in, or when I switch, but I would like that to be a possibility. I try to pay attention to which state I’m in. Lately, I feel Closed, and I wonder why. I was literally just open.

***Times in my life where I was Open include, but are not limited to***
The beginning of junior year of college
Early Covid
7th Grade
Like literally just a bit ago

I mark these Open Times in my life by an abundance of energy. I am able to make new friends and connections. Money seems to flow (both in and out). There’s a sort of “lubricant” in my daily activities that allows everything to just slide into place. Conversations come natural, opportunities present themselves. I ride this wave of energy until my social calendar is full to bursting, I’m swamped with meetings and appointments and suddenly I’m too busy to sleep and eat and then.. I crash. I Close.

***Time in my life where I was Closed include, but are not limited to***
The end of junior year of college
Late Covid
8th Grade
Right now

I’ve been around the block. I know the EXACT moment when I Close. It’s like the world becomes 2D. Everything is difficult now. What was once just “making a cup of coffee” becomes like 10 distinct steps – grind the beans, boil the water, pre-heat the vessel. What was once “take a random 3-week trip to New York” becomes “share a railway apartment with someone you don’t know who has the opposite schedule of you, wear 3 layers because it’s 9 degrees outside, live 15 minutes from the L train.” To wit-

***I ask, Closed:***
Why am I in New York, again?

Again, Closed me is left to deal with the choices of Open me. I know, I know. You’re probably thinking this sounds like some manic-depressive spiral, but it’s not1. It’s almost like there’s a spectrum of energy to the human experience and I have reduced it into some sort of binary system. Very progressive of me. I suppose it’s just a way to make sense of the phenomenon.

I mark the Closing Times in my life by a conservation of energy. Making new friendships feels convoluted and inscrutable. I have a stronger conception of money (in the psychological sense). Rather than feeling like I’m “gliding” around, I am aware of every bump I grind against, and every bump I present to someone else’s grind. Conversations are bogged down by internal narration and opportunities seem locked behind a closed door. Eventually, I grow tired of this valley and force myself to fill my social calendar, plan meetings and create opportunities and the cycle repeats.

I find that in the Closing Times I do my best, deepest creative work. I unwind the tangled mess of life experiences and feelings I allowed to wash over me in the Open Times. It’s like the Open Times are times when I go spelunking into the dragon’s den to nab the jewels. No time to think, no time to question – if I do, I’ll psyche myself out. And as soon as I grab the jewels I was looking for, I realize how precious they are to me and suddenly the cave is this dark scary place of dangers and I have to force myself to navigate myself out of it, protective of my prize. But when I emerge, I am richer, and foolishly confident, and ready to enter the cave again.

Of course, in practice, it doesn’t seem as obvious. For example, 3 years ago today, it was the Open Times. See if you can see the signs of the incoming Closure.

1/23/22
GREAT FUCKING WEEKEND

Will i remember this forever? as one of the goat weekends?

[REDACTED RECAP]

lots to do this week. tomorrow coffee w Codename: Ace. that’s about it
– upload video
– change cover art
– plan social posts
– new video skit thing?
– tiktok
– write diary entry thing. about what?
– meet w [REDACTED]
– watch music videos
– tax return
– financial planning/budget
– hit up [REDACTED]. SIGN FUCKING LEASE

so much to do. can’t overload myself!!

i can balance everything. i can center the pendulum.

***Freeze frame – cue narrator***
He could not, in fact, center the pendulum.

Interestingly enough, that weekend was the weekend I first met Codename: Didi. She felt like one of those gifts from the universe that just keep coming in the Open Times. I was thinking about her, today, walking through Williamsburg. We came here together – I had never been to New York before her. It was around this same time of the year. Back then, I only wore 1 jacket – it didn’t feel as cold. The L Train was so romantic to me. Joe’s Pizza was the Mecca of slices. McCarren might as well have been Central Park. But now, three years later and that relationship is Closed, and I’m wearing a scarf and winter gloves because the cold snap makes my commute to the L train dreadful so when it’s delayed I’m screaming! I know the location of every Joe’s and don’t bother with anything but the cheese because it’s the best value-per-calorie pit stop to power my 15,000 steps. And you cannot, in fact, walk around McCarren for an entire day.

I would hope that I’m dead-on about these week-month long states of Open and Closed. I am scared to think that I was, in fact, in a multi-year long Open Time that culminated in that weekend in 2022 and now I’m staring down an equal and opposite Closing Time. I wonder, as I contemplate leaving LA for NYC, am I leaving the Long Summer for the Long Winter? Because right now, it’s fucking cold.

Ultimately, the metaphysical question at the bottom of this is:

***Which do you have control over?***
Opening or Closing?

Logically, at least in my Westerner’s concept of the thing, to “Open” is a choice. To say “Yes.” We live in a world of stasis it is up to you, dear observer, to say “Yes” and ALLOW the river of energy to flow through. However, I postulate this – perhaps it is to “Close” that is the choice. Perhaps, naively, we live in a world of abundant energy and we must choose for our own sake to sometimes say “No.” To say enough is enough. The optimist in me (deeply buried) thinks that it’s okay to step out of the river because it will keep flowing with or without me. That’s the kind of world I want to live in. Today, that’s the world I choose to live in.

***So again, I ask:***

Why am I in New York, again?

Because in a moment of joy and love for life and spurred on by the promise of adventure I bought myself a ticket, somehow knowing that the dates would line up with a cold snap when I would be forced to either slip on the frozen sidewalks or move heaven and earth to bring the sun out and melt away the ice.

And just like that, out the window – a sliver of blue.

’Til next time – mbk

FOOTNOTES:
1. It probably is, to some degree. But I like to think I manage the amplitude of the waves, so to speak, so as to minimize the crash.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment