Dan Hinze

Regular Reflections #2: Ups and downs

Jan 13, 2026

I had a cold basically all of last week. That put a damper on things, but DayQuil and NyQuil went a long way in persevering through.

In shittier news in which persevering through isn't quite so simple, ICE murdered a civilian in broad daylight. It's really easy to doomscroll, but this is another time in which the best thing you can do is being in community and supporting one another. Donate to and volunteer with your local mutual aid groups. Go to a protest. Support immigrant-owned businesses. Do what you can.

Rest in power, Renee Good. I'll leave it to Chris Weisman to make a plea for our shared collective humanity, even now:

There’s a brilliance in Good’s eyes when she says it that I can’t stop seeing. “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” To paraphrase someone paraphrasing someone else in some YouTube comments: He didn’t kill her because he was afraid. He killed her because she wasn’t.

That’s what I saw too. Either that or he’s an unbelievable coward.

Pray for the victims, but also pray for the perpetrators. The latter are in deep spiritual trouble. (Only a radical moral relativist could argue that those in power get to define right and wrong to the degree this administration is attempting—with no reference to any truth outside itself.)

Pray for the victims, but also pray for the perpetrators. All of them are us.

I finished reading Martyr!, by far my favorite novel I've read in a while. More poets should write novels; the imagery in the prose is so compelling. As is my tendency for anything I really like, I went on a deep dive of searching for everything related to this book and Kaveh's work more broadly. This talk with author John Green, discussing aspects of the book and much more, was particularly good. In an exchange where they're talking about the difference between the experience of reading poetry vs fiction, Kaveh says:

Like that poem that I just read to you, you don't have to have any understanding of poetry to feel the way, I mean, I don't know what that poem means. I love it, it's one of my favorite poems of all time, and I don't know what it means, like I'm not trying to strap it to an autopsy table and beat a confession out of it, you know what I mean? Like it's just a beautiful poem, right? Like if a hawk flew in this window and sat right there, we'd all be like, "Wow, what a rare encounter with something full that is not of me, that is living in its own system." You know what I mean? It wouldn't be like, "Oh, the wings represent my mom." (Audience laughter) You know what I mean? Like, it's like, we wouldn't try to do that to anything else, right? You listen to "Ave Maria" and you weep, even if you don't speak a word of the language, right? You listen to Future and you get hyped for a run, right? Like we understand that art can work this way, but for whatever reason, we expect something different of poetry, right? We expect it to be this puzzle box, and we say things like, "Oh, I'm not smart," or, "I just don't get poetry." You would never say, "Oh, I just don't get music," right? "I just don't get talking."

I really love that way of framing it. As much as we love to analyze art, good art transcends our need to explain it. Anyway, if you know of anything that touched you in the same way this book might please let me know. I would read a thousand more books this good.

After 3 straight years of attending Big Ears, I'm taking a break. On the shortlist of other music festivals I've wanted to check out, NYC Winter Jazzfest was near the top. This past weekend, I finally got to make it happen.

The primary days of Winter Jazzfest are structured in a similar manner to Big Ears as a dispersed festival: all of Friday's music is spread out between a handful of venues in Lower Manhattan, while all of Saturday is in Brooklyn, primarily north Williamsburg. This was a great way to check out some venues I'd long wanted to see shows at, as well. A few of my favorite sets:

• Patricia Brennan's "Of The Near And Far" ensemble at (Le) Poisson Rouge (LPR) - a 10-piece group that comprised of a jazz quintet + string quartet + electronics. Incredible arranging and surprisingly good live sound given the size of the group.
• Tomas Fujiwara's "Dream Up" ensemble at Nublu - a percussion quartet group. Lots of fun grooves and textures. Including the side stairs and balcony, the venue's stage sort of puts the performers in the round, which made for a cool vibe.
• Dawn of Midi at National Sawdust - It had been a while since I'd listened to Dawn of Midi, but I knew I wanted to experience them live. After seeing them with a friend much more versed in metal than I am, I'm coining them "Meshuggah but make it an acoustic piano trio". Just a great polyrhythmic stew. Another venue where I really liked the overall vibe.

As is the nature of music festivals, there were plenty of bookmarked sets I had to miss (Lex Korten, Alden Hellmuth, etc), but I came away really satisfied with what I got to hear. It's a good fest I'll be tempted to return to in the future.

This was my first NYC trip with extended time in Brooklyn. While the festival dominated both my time and drained my energy for much else outside of it, I managed to have a few other highlights:

• Driftaway Coffee is a top-notch roaster not far from where I stayed. I got a few bags of beans I'm excited to experience at home.
• Sunday afternoon was spent wandering around Greenpoint a little bit, including some pastries from Peter Pan Donuts, which seems to be a bit of an institution.

Music and the aforementioned cold left any museum visits out of the equation, but there's always next time.